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HUMAN NATURE 
IN POLITICS 



BOOKS BY GRAHAM WALLAS 

THE GREAT SOCIETY 
OUR SOCIAL HERITAGE 
THE LIFE OF FRANCIS PLACE 
HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



HUMAN NATURE 
IN POLITICS 



BY 

GRAHAM WALLAS 



THIRD EDITION 




ALFRED- A KNOPF MCMXXI 



COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 



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NOI/ 25 19?) 



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FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



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1 



PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION (1920) 

This edition is, like the second edition (1910), a re- 
print, with a few verbal corrections, of the first edition 
(1908). 

I tried in 1908 to make two main points clear. My 
first point was the danger, for all human activities, but 
especially for the working of democracy, of the "in- 
tellectualist" assumption, "that every human action is 
the result of an intellectual process, by which a man 
first thinks of some end which he desires, and then cal- 
culates the means by which that end can be attained" 
(p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting 
for that assumption a conscious and systematic effort 
of thought. "The whole progress," I argued, "of hu- 
man civilization beyond its earliest stages, has been 
made possible by the invention of methods of thought 
which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of 
nature more successfully than we could, if we merely 
followed the line of least resistance in the use of our 
minds" (p. 114). 

In 1920 insistence on my first point is not so necessary 
as it was in 1908. The assumption that men are auto- 



6 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

matically guided by "enlightened self-interest" has been 
discredited by the facts of the war and the peace, the 
success of an anti-parliamentary and anti-intellectualist 
revolution in Russia, the British election of 1918, the 
French election of 1919, the confusion of politics in 
America, the breakdown of political machinery in 
Central Europe, and the general unhappiness which has 
resulted from four years of the most intense and heroic 
effort that the human race has ever made. One only 
needs to compare the disillusioned realism of our present 
war and post-war pictures and poems with the nineteenth- 
century war pictures at Versailles and Berlin, and the 
war poems of Campbell, and Berenger, and Tennyson, 
to realize how far we now are from exaggerating human 
rationality. 

It is my second point, which, in the world as the war 
has left it, is most important. There is no longer much 
danger that we shall assume that man always and auto- 
matically thinks of ends and calculates means. The 
danger is that we may be too tired or too hopeless to 
undertake the conscious effort by which alone we can 
think of ends and calculate means. 

The great mechanical inventions of the nineteenth 
century have given us an opportunity of choosing for 
ourselves our way of living such as men have never 



P R E F AG E 



had before. Up to our own time the vast majority of 
mankind have had enough to do to keep themselves 
property owners or a few organizers of other men's 
labours. Even when, as in ancient Egypt or Meso- 
potamia, nature offered whole populations three hundred 
free days in the year if they would devote two months 
to ploughing and harvest, all but a fraction still spent 
alive, and to satisfy the blind instinct w^hich impels 
them to hand on life to another generation. An effective 
choice has only been given to a tiny class of hereditary 
themselves in unwilling toil, building tombs or palaces, 
or equipping armies, for a native monarch or a foreign 
conqueror. The monarch could choose his life, but his 
choice was poor enough. "There is," says Aristotle, "a 
way of living so brutish that it is only worth notice 
because many of those who can live any life they like 
make no better choice than did Sardanapalus." 

The Greek thinkers started modern civilization, be- 
cause they insisted that the trading populations of their 
walled cities should force themselves to think out an 
answer to the question, what kind of life is good. "The 
origin of the city-state," says Aristotle, "is that it enables 
us to live; its justification is that it enables us to live 
well." 

Before the war, there were in London and New York, 



8 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

and Berlin, thousands of rich men and women as free 
to choose their way of life as was Sardanapalus, and as 
dissatisfied with their own choice. Many of the sons and 
daughters of the owners of railways and coal mines and 
rubber plantations were "fed up" with motoring or 
bridge, or even with the hunting and fishing which 
meant a frank resumption of palaeolithic life without 
the spur of palaeolithic hunger. But my own work 
brought me into contact with an unprivileged class, 
whose degree of freedom was the special product of 
modem industrial civilization, and on whose use of their 
freedom the future of civilization may depend. A clever 
young mechanic, at the age when the Wander jahre of 
the mediaeval craftsman used to begin, would come 
home after tending a "speeded up" machine from 8 
A. M., with an hour's interval, till 5 P. M. At 6 P. M. he 
had finished his tea in the crowded living-room of his 
mother's house, and was "free" to do what he liked. 
That evening, perhaps, his whole being tingled with half- 
conscious desires for love and adventure and knowledge,^' 
and achievement. On another day he might have gone 
to a billiard match at his club or have hung round the 
corner for a girl who smiled at him as he left the fac- 
tory, or might have sat on his bed and ground at a 
chapter of Marx or Hobson. But this evening he saw 



P R E F AC E 



his life as a whole. The way of living that had been im- 
plied in the religious lessons at school seemed strangely 
irrelevant; but still he felt humble, and kind, and 
anxious for guidance. Should he aim at marriage, and 
if so should he have children at once or at all? If he 
did not marry, could he avoid self-contempt and dis- 
ease? Should he face the life of a socialist organizer, 
with its strain and uncertainty, and the continual pos- 
sibility of disillusionment? Should he fill up every eve- 
ning with technical classes and postpone his ideals until 
he had become rich? And if he became rich what 
should he do with his money? Meanwhile, there was 
the urgent impulse to walk and think ; but where should 
he walk to, and with whom? 

The young schoolmistress, in her bed-sitting-room a 
few streets off, was in no better case. She and a friend 
sat late last night, agreeing that the life they were living 
was no real life at all; but what was the alternative? 
Had the "home duties" to which her High Church sister 
"^devoted herself with devastating self-sacrifice any more 
meaning. Ought she, with her eyes open, and without 
much hope of spontaneous love, to enter into the child- 
less "modem" marriage which alone seemed possible 
for her? Ought she to spend herself in a reckless 
campaign for the suffrage? Meanwhile, she had had 



10 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

her tea, her eyes were too tired to read, and what on 
earth should she do till bedtime? 

Such moments of clear self -questioning were of course 
rare, but the nerve-fretting problems always existed. 
Industrial civilization had given the growing and work- 
ing generation a certain amount of leisure, and educa- 
tion enough to conceive of a choice in the use of that 
leisure; but had offered them no guidance in making 
their choice. 

We are faced, as I write, with the hideous danger that 
fighting may blaze up again throughout the whole 
Eurasian continent, and that the young men and girls 
of Europe may have no more choice in the way they 
spend their time than they had from 1914 to 1918 or 
the serfs of Pharaoh had in ancient Egypt. But if that 
immediate danger is avoided, I dream that in Europe 
and in America a conscious and systematic discussion 
by the young thinkers of our time of the conditions of a 
good life for an unprivileged population may be one of 
the results of the new vision of human nature and human 
possibilities w<hich modern science and modem industry 
have forced upon us. 

Within each nation, industrial organization may cease 
to be a confused and wasteful struggle of interests, if 
it is consciously related to a chosen way of life for which 



PREFACE 11 



it offers to every worker the material means. Inter- 
national relations may cease to consist of a constant 
plotting of evil by each nation for its neighbours, if ever 
the youth of all nations know that French, and British, 
and Germans, and Russians, and Chinese, and Ameri- 
cans, are taking a conscious part in the great adventure 
of discovering ways of living open to all, and which all 
can believe to be good. 

GRAHAM WALLAS. 
August 1920. 



CONTENTS 

_ PAGE 

Preface 5 

Synopsis 15 

Introduction 25 

PART I 

THE CONDITIONS OF THE PROBLEM 

CHAPTER 

I Impulse and Instinct in Politics 45 

II Political Entities 81 

III Non-Rational Inference in Politics 118 
IV The Material of Political Reasoning 133 

V The Method of Political Reasoning 156 

PART II 

POSSIBILITIES OF PROGRESS 

I Political Morality 185 

II Representative Government 215 

III Official Thought 225 

IV Nationality and Humanity 282 



SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 

(Introduction page 25) 

The study of politics is now in an unsatisfactory position. 
Throughout Europe and America, representative democracy is 
generally accepted as the best form of government; but those 
who have had most experience of its actual working are often 
disappointed and apprehensive. Democracy has not been ex- 
tended to non-European races, and during the last few years 
many democratic movements have failed. 

This dissatisfaction has led to much study of political in- 
stitutions; but little attention has been recently given in works 
on politics to the facts of human nature. Poltical science in 
the past was mainly based on conceptions of human nature, 
but the discredit of the dogmatic political writers of the early 
nineteeth century has made modern students of politics over- 
anxious to avoid anything which recalls their methods. That 
advance therefore of psychology which has transformed ped- 
agogy and criminology has left politics largely unchanged. 

The neglect of the study of human nature is likely, however, 
to prove only a temporary phase of political thought, and there 
are already signs that it is coming to an end. 

[PART I. — Chapter I. — Impulse and Instinct in Politics, 

page 45 

Any examination of human nature in politics must begin 
with an attempt to overcome that "intellectualism" which re- 

15 



16 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

suits both from the traditions of political science and from the 
mental habits of ordinary men. 
f Political impulses are not mere intellectual inferences from 
p calculations of means and ends; but tendencies prior to, 
though modified by, the thought and experience of individual 
human beings. This may be seen if we watch the action in 
politics of such impulses as personal affection, fear, ridicule, 
the desire of property, etc. 

All our impulses and instincts are greatly increased in their 
immediate effectiveness if they are "pure," and in their more 
permanent results if they are "first hand" and are connected 
with the earlier stages of our evolution. In modern politics 
the emotional stimulus which reaches us through the news- 
papers is generally "pure," but "second hand," and therefore 
is both facile and transient. 

The frequent repetition of an emotion or impulse is often 
distressing. Politicians, like advertisers, must allow for this 
fact, which again is connected with that combination of the 
need of privacy with intolerance of solitude to which we 
have to adjust our social arrangements. 

Political emotions are sometimes pathologically intensified 
when experienced simultaneously by large numbers of human 
beings in physical association, but the conditions of political 
life in England do not often produce this phenomenon. 

The future of international politics largely depends on the 
question whether we have a specific instinct of hatred for 
himaan beings of a different racial type from ourselves. The 
point is not yet settled, but many facts which are often ex- 
plained as the result of such an instinct seem to be due to 
other and more general instincts modified by association. 



SYNOPSIS OP CONTENTS 17 

(Chapter II. — Political Entities, page 81) 

Political acts and impulses are the result of the contact 
between human nature and its environment. During the period 
studied by the politician, human nature has changed very little, 
but political environment has changed with ever-increasing 
rapidity. 

Those facts of our environment which stimulate impulse 
and action reach us through our senses, and are selected from 
the mass of our sensations and memories by our instinctive or 
acquired knowledge of their significance. In politics the things 
recognized are, for the most part, made by man himself, and our 
knowledge of their significance is not instinctive but ccquired. 

Recognition tends to attach itself to symbols, which take the 
place of more complex sensations and memories. Some of the 
most diflficult problems in politics result from the relation be- 
tween the conscious use in reasoning of the symbols called 
words, and their more or less automatic and unconscious ef- 
fect in stimulating emotion and action. A. political symbol 
whose significance has once been established by association, 
may go through a psychological development of its own, apart 
from the history of the facts which were originally symbolized 
by it. This may be seen in the case of the names and emblems 
of nations and parties; and still more clearly in the history 
of those commercial entities — "teas" or "soaps" — which may 
be already made current by advertisement before any objects to 
be symbolized by them have been made or chosen. Ethical 
difficulties are often created by the relation between the quickly 
changing opinions of any individual politician and such slowly 
changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or the 
traditional personality of a newspaper which he may control. 



18 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

(Chapter III. — Non-Rational Inference in Politics, page 118) 

Intellectual ist political thinkers often assume, not only that 
political action is necessarily the result of inferences as to 
means and ends, but that all inferences are of the same 
"rational" type. 

It is difficult to distinguish sharply between rational and non- 
rational inferences in the stream of mental experience, but 
it is clear that many of the half-conscious processes by which 
men form their political opinions are non-rational. We can 
generally trust non-rational inferences in ordinary life, because 
they do not give rise to conscious opinions until they have been 
strengthened by a large number of undesigned coincidences. 
But conjurers and others who study our non-rational mental 
processes can so play upon them as to make us form absurd 
beliefs. The empirical art of politics consists largely in the 
creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subcon- 
scious non-rational inference. The process of inference may 
go on beyond the point desired by the politician who started it, 
and is as likely to take place in the mind of a passive news- 
paper-reader as among the members of the most excited 
crowd. 

{Chapter IV. — The Material of Political Reasoning, page 133) 

But men can and do reason, though reasoning is only one of 
their mental processes. The rules for valid reasoning laid 
down by the Greeks were intended primarily for use in pol- 
itics, but in politics reasoning has in fact proved to be more 
difficult and less successful than in the physical sciences. The 
chief cause of this is to be found in the character of its ma- 
terial. We have to select or create entities to reason about, 
just as we select or create entities to stimulate our impulses 



SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 19 



and non-rational inferences. In the physical sciences these 
selected entities are of two types, either concrete things made 
exactly alike, or abstract qualities in respect of which things 
otherwise unlike can be exactly compared. In politics, entities 
of the first type cannot be created, and political philosophers 
have constantly sought for some simple entity of the second 
type, some fact or quality, which may serve as' an exact "stand- 
ard" for political calculation. This search has hitherto been 
unsuccessful, and the analogy of the biological sciences sug- 
gests that politicians are most likely to acquire the power 
of valid reasoning when they, like doctors, avoid the over- 
simplification of their material and aim at using in their 
reasoning as many facts as possible about the human type, 
its individual variations, and its environment. Biologists have 
shown that large numbers of facts as to individual variations 
within any type can be remembered if they are arranged as 
continuous curves rather than as uniform rules or arbitrary ex- 
ceptions. On the other hand, any attempt to arrange the facts 
of environment with the same approach to continuity as is pos- 
sible with the facts of human nature is likely to result in 
error; the study of history cannot be assimilated to that of 
biology. 

{Chapter V. — The Method of Political Reasoning, page 156) 

The method of political reasoning has shared the traditional 
over-simplification of its subject-matter. 

In Economics, where both method and subject-matter were 
originally still more completely simplified, "quantitative" 
methods have since Jevons's time tended to take the place of 
"qualitative." How far is a similar change possible in poli- 
tics? 



20 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

Some political questions can obviously be argued quantita- 
tively. Others are less obviously quantitative. But even on 
the most complex political issues experienced and responsible 
statesmen do in fact think quantitatively, although the methods 
by which they reach their results are often unconscious. 

When, however, politicians start with intellectualist as- 
sumptions, though some half-consciously acquire quantitative 
habits of thought, many desert politics altogether from dis- 
illusionment and disgust. What is wanted in the training of 
a statesman is the fully conscious formulation and acceptance 
of methods which will not have to be unlearned. 

Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work 
of Royal Commissions, International Congresses, and other 
bodies and persons who have to arrange and draw conclusions 
from large masses of specially collected evidence. Thedr 
methods and vocabulary, even when not numerical, are now- 
adays in large part quantitative. 

In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition of over- 
simplification is apt to persist. 

[PART II. — Chapter I. — Political Morality, page 185) 

But in what ways can such changes in political science 
affect the actual trend of political forces? 

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and 
writers of the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner 
or later influence the moral judgments of the working poli- 
tician. A young candidate will begin with a new conception 
of his moral relation to those whose will and opinions he is 
attempting to influence. He will start, in that respect, from a 
position hitherto confined to statesmen who have been made 
cynical by experience. 



SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 21 



If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political 
morality might be changed for the worse. But the change will 
go deeper. When men become conscious of psychological 
processes of which they have been unconscious or half-con- 
scious, not only are they put on their guard against the ex- 
ploitation of those processes in themselves by others, but they 
become better able to control them from within. 

If, however, a conscious moral purpose is to be strong 
enough to overcome, as a political force, the advancing art of 
political exploitation, the conception of control from within 
must '-be formed into an ideal entity which, like "Science," can 
appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organized 
system of education. The difi&culties in this are great (owing 
in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-con- 
sciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of 
causation is not inconsistent with an increased intensity of moral 
passion, 

{Chapter II. — Representative Government, page 215) 

The changes now going on in our conception of the psycho- 
logical basis of politics will also re-open the discussion of 
representative democracy. 

Some of the old arguments in that discussion will no longer 
be accepted as valid, and it is probable that many political 
thinkers (especially among those who have been educated in 
the natural sciences) will return to Plato's proposal of a des- 
potic government carried on by a selected and trained class, 
who live apart from the "ostensible world"; though English ex- 
perience in India indicates that even the most carefully selected 
ofl&cial must still live in the "ostensible world," and that the 
argument that good government requires the consent of the 



22 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

governed does not depend for its validity upon its original 
intellectualist associations. 

Our new way of thinking about politics will, however, 
certainly change the form, not only of the argument for con- 
sent, but also of the institutions by which consent is expressed. 
An election (like a jury -trial) will be, and is already begin- 
ning to be, looked upon rather as a process by which right 
decisions are formed under right conditions, than as a me- 
chanical expedient by which decisions already formed are as- 
certained. 

Proposals for electoral reform which seem to continue the 
old intellectualist tradition are still brought forward, and new 
difficulties in the working of representative government will 
arise from the wider extension of political power. But that 
conception of representation may spread which desires both to 
increase the knowledge and public spirit of the voter and to 
provide that no strain is put upon him greater than he can bear. 

(Chapter III. — Official Thought, page 255j 

A quantitative examination of the political force created by 
popular election shows the importance of the work of non- 
elected officials in any effective scheme of democracy. 

What should be the relation between these officials and the 
elected representatives? On this point English opinion already 
shows a marked reaction from the intellectualist conception of 
representative government. We accept the fact that most state 
officials are appointed by a system uncontrolled either by indi- 
vidual members of parliament or by parliament as a whole, 
that they hold office during good behaviour, and that they are 
our main source of information as to some of the most diffi- 
cult points on which we form political judgments. It is 



SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 23 



largely an accident that the same system has not been intro- 
duced into our local government. 

But such a half-conscious acceptance of a partially inde- 
pendent Civil Service as an existing fact is not enough. We 
must set ourselves to realize clearly what we intend our ofi&cials 
to do, and to consider how far our present modes of appoint- 
ment, and especially our present methods of organizing of- 
ficial work, provide the most effective means for carrying out 
that intention. 

(Chapter IV. — Nationality and Humanity, page 282^ 

What influence will the new tendencies in political thought 
have on the emotional and intellectual conditions of political 
solidarity? 

In the old city-states, where the area of government corre- 
sponded to the actual range of human vision and memory, a 
kind of local emotion could be developed which is now im- 
possible in a "delocalized" population. The solidarity of a 
modern state must therefore depend on facts not of observa- 
tion but of imagination. 

The makers of the existing European national states, Mazzini 
and Bismarck, held that the possible extent of a state depended 
on national homogeneity, i.e. on the possibility that every in- 
dividual member of a state should believe that all the others 
were like himself. Bismarck thought that the degree of actual 
homogeneity which was a necessary basis for this belief could 
be made by "blood and iron"; Mazzini thought that mankind 
was already divided into homogeneous groups, whose limits 
should be followed in the reconstruction of Europe. Both were 
convinced that the emotion of political solidarity was impossi- 
ble between individuals of consciously different national types. 

During the last quarter of a century this conception of the 



24 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

world as composed of a mosaic of homogeneous nations has 
heen made more difi&cult (a) by the continued existence and 
even growth of separate national feelings within modern states, 
and (b) hj the fact that the European and non-European races 
have entered into closer political relationships. The attempt, 
therefore, to transfer the traditions of national homogeneity 
and solidarity either to the inhabitants, of a modem world- 
empire as a whole, or to the members of the dominant race in 
it,'*disguises the real facts and adds to the danger of war. 

Can we, however, acquire a political emotion based, not upon 
a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but upon the 
recognition of their unlikeness? Darwin's proof of the re- 
lation between individual and racial variation might have pro- 
duced such an emotion, if it had not been accompanied by 
the conception of the "struggle for life" as a moral duty. As 
it is, interracial and even interimperial wars can be represented 
as necessary stages in the progress of the species. But present- 
day biologists tell us that the improvement of any one race 
will come most effectively from the conscious co-operation, 
and not from the blind conflict of individuals; and it may be 
found that the improvement of the whole species will also 
come rather from a conscious world-purpose based upon a rec- 
ognition of the value of racial as well as individual variety, 
than from mere fighting. 



INTRODUCTION 

The study of politics is just now (1908) in a curiously 
unsatisfactory position. 

At first sight the main controversy as to the best form 
of government appears to have been finally settled in 
favour of representative democracy. Forty years ago 
it could still be argued that to base the sovereignty of a 
great modern nation upon a widely extended popular 
vote was, in Europe at least, an experiment which had 
never been successfully tried. England, indeed, by the 
"leap in the dark" of 1867, became for the moment the 
only large European State whose government was demo- 
cratic and representative. But to-day a parliamentary 
republic based upon universal suffrage exists in France 
without serious opposition or protest. Italy enjoys an 
apparently stable constitutional monarchy. Universal 
suffrage has just been enacted in Austria. Even the 
German Emperor for an instant after the election of 
1907 spoke of himself rather as the successful leader of 
a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritor of a 
divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation 
passionately desires a sovereign parliament, and a reac- 
tionary Duma finds itself steadily pushed by circum- 
stances towards that position. The most ultramontane 
Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope, 

25 



26 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■I I 

no longer as an ideal system of world government, but as 
an expedient for securing in a few square miles of Ital- 
ian territory liberty of action for the directors of a 
church almost all of whose members will remain voting 
citizens of constitutional States. None of the proposals 
for a non-representative democracy which were asso- 
ciated with the communist and anarchist movements of 
the nineteenth century have been at all widely accepted, 
or have presented themselves as a definite constructive 
scheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social 
change by which the results of modern scientific industry 
shall be more evenly distributed put their trust in the 
electoral activity of the working classes. 

And yet, in the very nations which have most whole- 
heartedly accepted representative democracy, politicians 
and political students seem puzzled and disappointed 
by their experience of it. The United States of America 
have made in this respect by far the longest and most 
continuous experiment. Their constitution has lasted 
for a century and a quarter, and, in spite of controversy 
and even war arising from opposing interpretations of its 
details, its principles have been, and still are, practically 
unchallenged. But as far as an English visitor can 
judge, no American thinks with satisfaction of the elec- 
toral "machine," whose power alike in Federal, State, 
and Municipal politics is still increasing. 

In England not only has our experience of representa- 
tive democracy been much shorter than that of America, 
but our political traditions have tended to delay the full 



INTRODUCTION 27 

acceptance of the democratic idea even in the working 
of democratic institutions. Yet, allowing for differences 
of degree and circumstance, one finds in England among 
the most loyal democrats, if they have been brought into 
close contact with the details of electoral organization, 
something of the same disappointment which has become 
more articulate in America. I have helped to fight a 
good many parliamentary contests, and have myself 
been a candidate in a series of five London municipal 
elections. In my last election I noticed that two of my 
canvassers, when talking over the day's work, used in- 
dependently the phrase, "It is a queer business." I 
have heard much the same words used in England by 
those professional political agents whose efficiency de- 
pends on their seeing electoral facts without illusion. 
I have no first-hand knowledge of German or Italian 
electioneering, but when a year ago I talked with my 
hosts of the Paris Municipal Council, I seemed to detect 
in some of them indications of good-humoured disillu- 
sionment with regard to the working of a democratic 
electoral system. 

In England and America one has, further, the feeling 
that it is the growing, and not the decaying, forces of 
society which create the most disquieting problems. In 
America the "machine" takes its worst form in those 
great new cities whose population and wealth and energy 
represent the goal towards which the rest of American 
civilization is apparently tending. In England, to any 
one who looks forward, the rampant bribery of the old 



28 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corrup- 
tion of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small 
and manageable evils. The more serious grounds for 
apprehension come from the newest inventions of wealth 
and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the power 
and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of in- 
dustrial capital, the organised political passions of work- 
ing men who have passed through the standards of the 
elementary schools, and who live in hundreds of square 
miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban streets. 
Every few years some invention in political method is 
made, and if it succeeds both parties adopt it. In poli- 
tics, as in football, the tactics which prevail are not those 
which the makers of the rules intended, but those 
by which the players find that they can win; and men 
feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is 
most likely to win may turn out not to be those by which 
a State is best governed. 

More significant still is the fear, often expressed as 
new questions force themselves into politics, that the 
existing electoral system will not bear the strain of an 
intensified social conflict. Many of the arguments used 
in the discussion of the tariff question in England, or of 
the concentration of capital in America, or of social- 
democracy in Germany, imply this. Popular election, 
it is said, may work fairly well as long as those questions 
are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and in- 
dustrial power to make full use of their opportunities. 
But if the rich people in any modern state thought it 



INTRODUCTION 29 

worth their while, in order to secure a tariff, or legalise a 
trust, or oppose a confiscatory tax, to subscribe a third of 
their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act 
yet invented w^ould prevent them from spending it. If 
they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the 
art of using skill for the production of emotion and 
opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of 
political contests would be changed for the future. No 
existing party, unless it enormously increased its own 
fund, or discovered some new source of political 
strength, would have any chance of permanent success. 

The appeal, however, in the name of electoral purity, 
to protectionists, trust-promoters, and socialists, that they 
should drop their various movements and so confine 
politics to less exciting questions, falls, naturally enough, 
on deaf ears. 

The proposal, again, to extend the franchise to women 
is met by that sort of hesitation and evasion which is 
characteristic of politicians who are not sure of their in- 
tellectual ground. A candidate who has just been 
speaking on the principles of democracy finds it, when 
he is heckled, very difficult to frame an answer which 
would justify the continued exclusion of women from the 
franchise. Accordingly a large majority of the success- 
ful candidates from both the main parties at the general 
election of 1906 pledged themselves to support female 
suffrage. But, as I write, many, perhaps the majority, 
of those who gave that pledge seem to be trying to avoid 
the necessity of carrying it out. There is no reason to 



30 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

suppose that they are men of exceptionally dishonest 
character, and their fear of the possible effect of a final 
decision is apparently genuine. They are aware that 
certain differences exist between men and women, though 
they do not know what those differences are, nor in what 
way they are relevant to the question of the franchise. 
But they are even less steadfast in their doubts than in 
their pledges, and the question will, in the comparatively 
near future, probably be settled by importunity on the 
one side and mere drifting on the other. 

This half conscious feeling of unsettlement on matters 
which in our explicit political arguments we treat as 
settled, is increased by the growing urgency of the prob- 
lem of race. The fight for democracy in Europe and 
America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries was carried on by men who were thinking only 
of the European races. But, during the extension of 
democracy after 1870, almost all the Great Powers were 
engaged in acquiring tropical dependencies, and im- 
provements in the means of communication were bringing 
all the races of the world into close contact. The ordi- 
nary man now finds that the sovereign vote has (with ex- 
ceptions numerically insignificant) been in fact confined 
to nations of European origin. But there is nothing in 
the form or history of the representative principle which 
seems to justify this, or to suggest any alternative for the 
vote as a basis of government. Nor can he draw any in- 
telligible and consistent conclusion from the practice 
of democratic States in giving or refusing the vote to 



INTRODUCTION 31 

their non-European subjects. The United States, for 
instance, have silently and almost unanimously dropped 
the experiment of negro suffrage. In that case, owing 
to the wide intellectual gulf between the West African 
negro and the white man from North-West Europe, the 
problem was comparatively simple; but no serious at- 
tempt has yet been made at a new solution of it, and 
the Americans have been obviously puzzled in dealing 
with the more subtle racial questions created by the 
immigration of Chinese and Japanese and Slavs, or by 
the government of the mixed populations in the Philip- 
pines. 

England and her colonies show a like uncertainty in 
the presence of the political questions raised both by the 
migration of non-white races and by the acquisition of 
tropical dependencies. Even when we discuss the politi- 
cal future of independent Asiatic States we are not clear 
whether the principle, for instance, of "no taxation 
without representation" should be treated as applicable 
to them. Our own position as an Asiatic power depends 
very largely on the development of China and Persia, 
which are inhabited by races who may claim, in some re- 
spects, to be our intellectual superiors. When they 
adopt our systems of engineering, mechanics, arma- 
ment we have no doubt that tliey are doing a good thing 
for themselves, even though w^e may fear their commer- 
cial or military rivalry. But no follower of Bentham is 
now eager to export for general Asiatic use our latest in- 
ventions in political machinery. We hear that the Per- 



32 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

sians have established a parliament, and watch the de- 
velopment of their experiment with a complete suspen- 
sion of judgment as to its probable result. We have 
helped the Japanese to preserve their independence as a 
constitutional nation, and most Englishmen vaguely sym- 
pathize with the desire of the Chinese progressives both 
for national independence and internal reform. Few of 
us, however, would be willing to give any definite ad- 
vice to an individual Chinaman who asked whether he 
ought to throw himself into a movement for a repre- 
sentative parliament on European lines. 

Within our own Empire this uncertainty as to the limi- 
tations of our political principles may at any moment 
produce actual disaster. In Africa, for instance, the 
political relationship between the European inhabitants 
of our territories and the non-European majority of Kaf- 
firs, Negroes, Hindoos, Copts, or Arabs is regulated on 
entirely different lines in Natal, Basutoland, Egypt, or 
East Africa. In each case the constitutional difference 
is due not so much to the character of the local problem 
as to historical accident, and trouble may break out any- 
where and at any time, either from the aggression of the 
Europeans upon the rights reserved by the Home Gov- 
ernment to the non-Europeans, or from a revolt of the 
non-Europeans themselves. Blacks and Whites are 
equally irritated by the knowledge that there is one law 
in Nairobi and another in Durban. 

This position is, of course, most dangerous in the case 
of India. For two or three generations the ordinary 



INTRODUCTION 33 

^^^"•^^^^"^"■^""^■"■^^"^^"""^^"^^""^■■"""-i^^^— ^i^^— "^^i^-^— ^p^— ^— i— ■•^^— ^^— «««»^ 

English Liberal postponed any decision on Indian poli- 
tical problems because he believed that we were educa- 
ting the inhabitants for self-government, and that in due 
time they would all have a vote for an Indian parlia- 
ment. Now he is becoming aware that there are many 
races in India, and that some of the most important dif- 
ferences between those races among themselves, and be- 
tween any of them and ourselves, are not such as can be 
obliterated by education. He is told by men whom he re- 
spects that this fact makes it certain that the represen- 
tative system which is suitable for England will never be 
suitable for India, and therefore he remains uneasily 
responsible for the permanent autocratic government of 
three hundred million people, remembering from time 
to time that some of these people or their neighbours 
may have much more definite political ideas than his 
own, and that he ultimately may have to fight for a 
power which he hardly desires to retain. 

Meanwhile, the existence of the Indian problem loos- 
ens half -consciously his grip upon democratic principle 
in matters nearer home. Newspapers and magazines 
and steamships are constantly making India more real 
to him, and the conviction of a Liberal that Polish immi- 
grants or London "latch-key" lodgers ought to have a 
vote is less decided than it would have been if he had 
not acquiesced in the decision that Rajputs, and Bengalis, 
and Parsees should be refused it. 

Practical politicians cannot, it is true, be expected to 
stop in the middle of a campaign merely because they 



34 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ t 

have an uncomfortable feeling that the rules of the game 
require re-stating and possibly re-casting. But the win- 
ning or losing of elections does not exhaust the whole 
political duty of a nation, and perhaps there never has 
been a time in which the disinterested examination of 
political principles has been more urgently required. 
Hitherto the main stimulus to political speculation has 
been provided by wars and revolutions, by the fight of the 
Greek States against the Persians, and their disastrous 
struggle for supremacy among themselves, or by the wars 
of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
and the American and French revolutions in the eight- 
eenth century. The outstanding social events in Europe 
in our own time have, however, been so far the failures 
rather than the successes of great movements; the ap- 
parent wasting of devotion and courage in Russia, owing 
to the deep-seated intellectual divisions among the re- 
formers and the military advantage which modern weap- 
ons and means of communication give to any govern- 
ment however tyrannous and corrupt; the baffling of the 
German social-democrats by the forces of religion and 
patriotism and by the infertility of their own creed; the 
weakness of the successive waves of American democracy 
when faced by the political power of capital. 

But failure and bewilderment may present as stern 
a demand for thought as the most successful revolution, 
and, in many respects, that demand is now being well 
answered. Political experience is recorded and exam- 
ined with a thoroughness hitherto unknown. The history 



INTRODUCTION 35 



of political action in the past, instead of being left to 
isolated scholars, has become the subject of organized 
and minutely subdivided labour. The new political 
developments of the present, Australian Federation, the 
Referendum in Switzerland, German Public Finance, the 
Party system in England and America, and innumerable 
others, are constantly recorded, discussed and compared 
in the monographs and technical magazines which cir- 
culate through all the universities of the globe. 

The only form of study which a political thinker of 
one or two hundred years ago would now note as missing 
is any attempt to deal with politics in its relation to the 
nature of man. The thinkers of the past, from Plato to 
Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human 
nature, and they made those views the basis of 
their speculations on government. But no modern trea- 
tise on political science, whether dealing with institutions 
or finance, now begins with anything corresponding to 
the opening words of Bentham's "Principles of Morals 
and Legislation" — "Nature has placed mankind under 
the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleas- 
ure"; or to the "first general proposition" of Nassau 
Senior's "Political Economy," "Every man desires to 
obtain additional w^ealth with as little sacrifice as pos- 
sible." ^ In most cases one cannot even discover 
whether the writer is conscious of possessing any con- 
ception of human nature at all. 

1 Political Economy (in the Encyclopedia Metro politana) , 2nd edition 
(1850), p. 26. 



36 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

^^™™«^— •^^i^— ■— ■••■^^^■""■— ^^^— ^■"■■— "^-^^^"^~^""^"^~~'~^^^~""~^"^~~~^^""~'"^~~"^^^* 

It is easy to understand how this has come about. 
Political science is just beginning to regain some mea- 
sure of authority after the acknowledged failure of its 
confident professions during the first half of the nine- 
teenth century. Bentham's Utilitarianism, after super- 
seding both Natural Right and the blind tradition of the 
lawyers, and serving as the basis of innumerable legal 
and constitutional reforms throughout Europe, was killed 
by the unanswerable refusal of the plain man to believe 
that ideas of pleasure and pain are the only sources of 
human motive. The "classical" political economy of 
the universities and the newspapers, the political econ- 
omy of MacCulloch and Senior and Archbishop 
Whately, was even more unfortunate in its attempts to 
deduce a whole industrial polity from a "few simple 
principles" of human nature. It became identified with 
the shallow dogmatism by which well-to-do people in the 
first half of Queen Victoria's reign tried to convince 
working men that any change in the distribution of the 
good things of life was "scientifically impossible." Marx 
and Ruskin and Carlyle were masters of sarcasm, and the 
process is not yet forgotten by which they slowly com- 
pelled even the newspapers to abandon the "laws of 
political economy," which from 1815 to 1870 stood, like 
gigantic stuffed policemen, on guard over rent and prof- 
its. 

When the struggle against "Political Economy" was at 
its height, Darwin's "Origin of Species" revealed a uni- 
verse in which the "few simlple principles" seemed a 



INTRODUCTION 37 



little absurd, and nothing has hitherto taken their place. 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, indeed, attempted to turn a single 
hasty generalization from the history of biological evo- 
lution into a complete social philosophy. He preached 
what he called "the beneficent working of the survival 
of the fittest" ("Man versus the State" p. 50), and Sir 
Henry Maine called "beneficent private war," ^ a pro- 
cess which they conceived of as no more dangerous than 
that degree of trade competition which prevailed among 
English provincial shopkeepers about the year 1884. 
Mr. Spencer failed to secure even the whole-hearted sup- 
port of the newspapers; but in so far as his system 
gained currency it helped further to discredit any at- 
tempt to connect political science with the study of 
human nature. 

For the moment, therefore, nearly all students of poli- 
tics analyse institutions and avoid the analysis of man. 
The study of human nature by the psychologists has, it 
is true, advanced enormously since the discovery of 
human evolution, but it has advanced without affecting 
or being affected by the study of politics. Modem 
text-books of psychology are illustrated with innum- 
erable facts from the home, the school, the hospital, and 
the psychological laboratory; but in them politics are 
hardly ever mentioned. The professors of the new 
science of sociology are beginning, it is true, to deal with 
human nature in its relation not only to the family and to 

i"The beneficent private war which makes one man strive to climb 
over the shoulders of another man." (Maine. Popular Government, p. 
50), See D. G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics, p. 4. 



38 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

religion and industry, but also to certain political 
institutions. Sociology, however, has had, as yet, little 
influence on political science. 

I believe myself that this tendency to separate the 
study of politics from that of human nature will prove 
to be only a momentary phase of thought; that while it 
lasts its effects, both on the science and on the conduct of 
politics, are likely to be harmful; and that there are 
already signs that it is coming to an end. 

It is sometimes pleaded that, if thorough work is to be 
done, there must, in the moral as in the physical sciences, 
be division of labour. But this particular division can- 
not, in fact, be kept up. The student of politics must, 
consciously or unconsciously, j^orm a conception of 
human nature, and the less conscious he is of his concep- 
tion the more likely he is to be dominated by it. If he 
has had wide personal experience of political life his un- 
conscious assumptions may be helpful ; if he has not they 
are certain to be misleading. Mr. Roosevelt's little book 
on "American Ideals" is, for instance, useful, because 
when he thinks about mankind in politics, he thinks about 
the politicians whom he has known. After reading it 
one feels that many of the more systematic books on 
politics by American university professors are useless, 
just because the writers dealt with abstract men, formed 
on assumptions of which they were unaware and which 
they had never tested either by experience or by study. 

In the other sciences which deal with human actions, 
this division between the study of the thing done and the 



INTRODUCTION 39 

■^^"""^"^■^^^^^~~^"~"~"^^^"~"— — ■— ^^— ^i^"-"— ~i— ^— i— ^— ^"^^i^— i>— ^^■^^^— I— «•— «»«i™^^— i^ 

study of the being who does it is not found. In crim- 
inology Beccaria and Bentham long ago showed how 
dangerous that jurisprudence was which separated the 
classification of crimes from the study of the criminal. 
The conceptions of human nature which they held have 
been superseded by evolutionary psychology, but modern 
thinkers like Lombroso have brought the new psychology 
into the service of a new and fruitful criminolog}^ 

In pedagogy also, Locke, and Rousseau, and Herbart, 
and the many-sided Bentham, based their theories of 
education upon their conceptions of human nature. 
Those conceptions were the same as those which underlay 
their political theories, and have been affected in the 
same way by modem knowledge. For a short time it 
even looked as if the lecturers in the English training 
colleges would make the same separation between the 
study of human institutions and human nature as has 
been made in politics. Lectures on School Method were 
distinguished during this period from those on the The- 
ory of Education. The first became mere descriptions 
and comparisons of the organization and teaching in the 
best schools. The second consisted of expositions, with 
occasional comment and criticism, of such classical 
writers as Comenius, or Locke, or Rousseau, and 
were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle, 
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name 
of the Theory of Politics, formed in my time such 
a pleasant interlude in the Oxford course of Humaner 



40 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



Letters. But while the Oxford lecture-courses still, 
I believe, survive almost unchanged, the training 
college lectures on the Theory of Education are begin- 
ning to show signs of a change as great as that which took 
place in the training of medical students, when the lec- 
turers on anatomy, instead of expounding the classical 
authorities, began to give, on their own responsibility, 
the best account of the facts of human structure of 
which they were capable. 

The reason for this difference is, apparently, the fact 
that while Oxford lecturers on the Theory of Politics 
are not often politicians, the training college lecturers 
on the Theory of Teaching have always been teachers, 
to whom the question whether any new knowledge could 
be made useful in their art was one of living and urgent 
importance. One finds accordingly that under the 
leadership of men like Professors William James, Lloyd 
Morgan, and Stanley Hall, a progressive science of 
teaching is being developed, which combines the study of 
types of school organization and method with a deter- 
mined attempt to learn from special experiments, from 
introspection, and from other sciences, what manner of 
thing a child is. 

Modem pedagogy, based on modem psychology, is 
already influencing the schools whose teachers are trained 
for their profession. Its body of facts is being yearly 
added to ; it has already caused the abandonment of much 
dreary waste of time; has given many thousands of teach- 
ers a new outlook on their work; and has increased the 



INTRODUCTION 41 

knowledge and happiness of many tens of thousands of 
children. 

This essay of mine is offered as a plea that a corre- 
sponding change in the conditions of political science is 
possible. In the great university whose constituent 
colleges are the universities of the world, there is a 
steadily growing body of professors and students of 
politics who give the whole day to their work. I cannot 
but think that as years go on, more of them will call to 
their aid that study of mankind which is the ancient ally 
of the moral sciences. Within every great city there are 
groups of men and women who are brought together 
in the evenings by the desire to find something more sat- 
isfying than current political controversy. They have 
their own unofficial leaders and teachers, and among 
these one can already detect an impatience with the 
alternative offered, either of working by the bare com- 
parison of existing institutions, or of discussing the 
fitness of socialism or individualism, of democracy or 
aristocracy for human beings whose nature is taken for 
granted. 

If my book is read by any of these official or unofficial 
thinkers, I would urge that the study of human nature 
in politics, if ever it comes to be undertaken by the 
united and organized efforts of hundreds of learned 
men, may not only deepen and widen our knowledge of 
political institutions, but open an unworked mine of poli- 
tical invention. 



PART I 



THE CONDITIONS OF 
THE PROBLEM 



CHAPTER I 

IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 
IN POLITICS 

Whoever sets himself to base his political thinking on 
a re-examination of the working of human nature, must 
begin by trying to overcome his own tendency to ex- 
aggerate the intellectuality of mankind. 

We are apt to assume that every human action is the 
result of an intellectual process, by which a man first 
thinks of some end which he desires, and then calculates 
the means by which that end can be attained. An in- 
vestor, for instance, desires good security combined with 
five per cent, interest. He spends an hour in studying 
with an open mind the price-list of stocks, and finally 
infers that the purchase of Brewery Debentures will en- 
able him most completely to realize his desire. Given 
the original desire for good security, his act in purchas- 
ing the Debentures appears to be the inevitable result of 
his inference. The desire for good security itself may 
further appear to be merely an intellectual inference as 
to the means of satisfying some more general desire, 
shared by all mankind, for "happiness," our own "in- 
terest," or the like. The satisfaction of this general de- 
sire can then be treated as the supreme "end" of life, 
from which all our acts and impulses, great and small, 
are derived by the same intellectual process as that by 

45 



46 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

which the conclusion is derived from the premises of 
an argument. 

This way of thinking is sometimes called "common 
sense." A good example of its application to politics 
may be found in a sentence from Macaulay's celebrated 
attack on the Utilitarian followers of Bentham in the 
Edinburgh Review of March 1829. This extreme in- 
stance of the foundation of politics upon dogmatic 
psychology is, curiously enough, part of an argument 
intended to show that "it is utterly impossible to deduce 
the science of government from the principles of human 
nature." "What proposition," Macaulay asks, "is 
there respecting human nature which is absolutely and 
universally true? We know of only one: and that is not 
only true, but identical; that men always act from self- 
interest. . . . When we see the actions of a man, we 
know with certainty what he thinks his interest to 6e."^ 
Macaulay believes himself to be opposing Benthamism 
root and branch, but is unconsciously adopting and ex- 
aggerating the assumption which Bentham shared with 
most of the other eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- 
tury philosophers — that all motives result from the idea 
of some preconceived end. 

If he had been pressed, Macaulay would probably 
have admitted that there are cases in which human acts 
and impulses to act occur independently of any idea 
of an end to be gained by them. If I have a piece of 
grit in my eye, and ask some one to take it out with the 

1 Edinburgh Review, March 1829, p 185. (The italics are mine.) 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 47 



comer of his handkerchief, I generally close the eye as 
soon as the handkerchief comes near, and always feel a 
strong impulse to do so. Nobody supposes that I close 
my eye because, after due consideration, I think it my in- 
terest to do so. Nor do most men choose to run away 
in battle, to fall in love, or to talk about the weather in 
order to satisfy their desire for a preconceived end. If, 
indeed, a man were followed through one ordinary day, 
without his knowing it, by a cinematographic camera 
and a phonograph, and if all his acts and sayings were 
reproduced before him next day, he would be astonished 
to find how few of them were the result of a deliberate 
search for the means of attaining ends. He would, of 
course, see that much of his activities consisted in the 
half -conscious repetition, under the influence of habit, 
of movements which were originally more fully con- 
scious. But even if all cases of habit were excluded he 
would find that only a small proportion of the residue 
could be explained as being directly produced by an in- 
tellectual calculation. If a record were also kept of 
those of his impulses and emotions which did not result 
in action, it would be seen that they were of the same 
kind as those which did, and and that very few of them 
were preceded by that process which Macaulay takes 
for granted. 

If Macaulay had been pressed still further, he would 
probably have admitted that even when an act is pre- 
ceded by a calculation of ends and means, it is not 
the inevitable result of that calculation. Even when 
we know what a man thinks it his interest to do, we do 



48 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

not know for certain that he will do it. The man who 
studies the Stock Exchange list does not buy his Deben- 
tures, unless, apart from his intellectual inference on the 
subject, he has an impulse to write to his stockbroker 
sufficiently strong to overcome another impulse to put 
the whole thing off till the next day. 

Macaulay might even further have admitted that the 
mental act of calculation itself results from, or is ac- 
companied by, an impulse to calculate, which impulse 
may have nothing to do with any anterior consideration 
of means and ends, and may vary from the half-con- 
scious yielding to a train of reverie up to the obstinate 
driving of a tired brain into the difficult task of exact 
thought. 

The text-books of psychology now warn every student 
against the "intellectualist" fallacy which is illustrated 
by my quotation from Macaulay. Impulse, it is now 
agreed, has an evolutionary history of its own earlier 
than the history of those intellectual processes by which 
it is often directed and modified. Our inherited organ- 
ization inclines us to re-act in certain ways to certain 
stimuli because such reactions have been useful in the 
past in preserving our species. Some of the reactions 
are what we call specifically "instincts," that is to say, 
impulses towards definite acts or series of acts, indepen- 
dent of any conscious anticipation of their probable ef- 
fects. ^ Those instincts are sometimes unconscious and 

^ "Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to 
produce certain ends without foresight of the ends and without previous 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 49 

involuntary ; and sometimes, in the case of ourselves and 
apparently of other higher animals, they are conscious 
and voluntary. But the connection between means and 
ends which they exhibit is the result not of any contri- 
vance by the actor, but of the survival, in the past, of the 
"fittest" of many varying tendencies to act. Indeed the 
instinct persists when it is obviously useless, as in the 
case of a dog who turns round to flatten the grass be- 
fore lying down on a carpet ; and even when it is known 
to be dangerous, as when a man recovering from ty- 
phoid hungers for solid food. 

The fact that impulse is not always the result of 
conscious foresight is most clearly seen in the case of 
children. The first impulses of a baby to suck, or to 
grasp, are obviously "instinctive." But even when the 
unconscious or unremembered condition of infancy 
has been succeeded by the connected consciousness of 
childhood, the child will fly to his mother and hide 
his face in her skirts when he sees a harmless stranger. 
Later on he will torture small beasts and run away from 
big beasts, or steal fruit, or climb trees, though no one 
has suggested such actions to him, and though he may 
expect disagreeable results from them. 

We generally think of "instinct" as consisting of a 
number of such separate tendencies, each towards some 
distinct act or series of acts. But there is no reason to 
suppose that the whole body of inherited impulse even 

education in the performance"— W. James, Principles of Psychology, 
vol. ii. p. 383. 



50 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ 

among non-human animals has ever been divisible in 
that way. The evolutionary history of impulse must 
have been very complicated. An impulse which sur- 
vived because it produced one result may have per- 
sisted with modifications because it produced another 
result; and side by side with impulses towards specific 
acts we can detect in all animals vague and generalized 
tendencies, often overlapping and contradictory, like 
curiosity and shyness, sympathy and cruelty, imitation 
and restless activity. It is possible, therefore, to avoid 
the ingenious dilemma by which Mr. Balfour argues 
that we must either demonstrate that the desire, e.g., for 
scientific truth, is lineally descended from some one of 
the specific instincts which teach us "to fight, to eat, and 
to bring up children," or must admit the supernatural 
authority of the Shorter Catechism.^ 

The prerational character of many of our impulses is, 
however, disguised by the fact that during the lifetime 
of each individual they are increasingly modified by 
memory and habit and thought. Even the non-human 
animals are able to adapt and modify their inherited 
impulses either by imitation or by habits founded on 
individual experience. When telegraph wires, for 
instance, were first put up many birds flew against them 
and were killed. But although the number of those that 

1 Reflections suggested by the New Theory of Matter, 1904, p. 21. "Sa 
far as natural science can tell us, every quality of sense or intellect which 
does not help us to fight, to eat, and to bring up children, is but a by- 
product of the qualities which do." 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 51 



were killed was obviously insufficient to produce a change 
in the biological inheritance of the species, very few 
birds fly against the wires now. The young birds must 
have imitated their elders, who had learnt to avoid the 
wires; just as the young of many hunting animals are 
said to learn devices and precautions which are the 
result of their parents' experience, and later to make 
and hand down by imitation inventions of their own. 

Many of the directly inherited impulses, again, 
appear, both in man and other animals, at a certain 
point in the growth of the individual, and then, if they 
are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, form 
habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and 
useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, 
like the whale's legs or our teeth and hair, be weak- 
ened by biological degenerartion. Such temporary or 
weakened impulses are especially liable to be trans- 
ferred to new objects, or to be modified by experience 
and thought. 

With all these complicated facts the schoolmaster 
has to deal. In Macaulay's time he used to be guided 
by his "common-sense," and to intellectualize the whole 
process. The unfortunate boys who acted upon an 
ancient impulse to fidget, to play truant, to chase cats, 
or to mimic their teacher, were asked, with repeated 
threats of punishment, "why" they had done so. They, 
being ignorant of their own evolutionary history, were 
forced to invent some far-fetched lie, and were punished 
for that as well. The trained schoolmaster of today 



52 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

takes the existence of such impulses as a normal fact; 
and decides how far, in each case, he shall check 
them by relying on that half-conscious imitation which 
makes the greater part of class-room discipline, and 
how far by stimulating a conscious recognition of the 
connection, ethical or penal, between acts and their 
consequences. In any case his power of controlling 
instinctive impulse is due to his recognition of its 
non-intellectual origin. He may even be able to 
extends this recognition to his own impulses, and to 
overcome the conviction that his irritability during 
afternoon school in July is the result of an intellectual 
conclusion as to the need of special severity in dealing 
with a set of unprecedentedly wicked boys. 

The politician, however, is still apt to intellectualize 
impulse as completely as the schoolmaster did fifty 
years ago. He has two excuses, that he deals entirely 
with adults, whose impulses are more deeply modified 
by experience and thought than those of children, and 
that it is very difficult for any one who thinks about 
politics not to confine his consideration to those political 
actions and impulses which are accompanied by the 
greatest amount of conscious thought, and which 
theiefore come first into his mind. But the politician 
thinks about men in large communities, and it is in the 
forecasting of the action of large communities that the 
intellectualist fallacy is most misleading. The results 
of experience and thought are often confined to 
individuals or small groups, and when they differ may 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 53 



cancel each other as political forces. The original 
human impulses are, with personal variations, common 
to the whole race, and increase in their importance with 
an increase in the number of those influenced by them. 

It may be worth while, therefore, to attempt a de- 
scription of some of the more obvious or more important 
political impulses, remembering always that in politics 
we are dealing not with such clear-cut separate instincts 
as we may find in children and animals, but with 
tendencies often weakened by the course of human evolu- 
tion, still more often transferred to new uses, and acting 
not simply but in combination or counteraction. 

Aristotle, for instance, says that it is "affection" (or 
"friendship," for the meaning of (fx-^^o- stands halfway 
between the two words) which "makes political union 
possible," and "which law-givers consider more import- 
ant than justice." It is, he says, a hereditary instinct 
among animals of the same race, and particularly 
among men/ If we look for this political aff'ection in 
its simplest form, we see it in our impulse to feel 
"kindly" towards any other human being of whose 
existence and personality we become vividly aware. 
This impulse can be checked and overlaid by others, but 
any one can test its existence and its prerationality in his 
own case by going, for instance, to the British Museum 

1 Ethics, Bk. viii. chap. 1. ^i^o-et r' evvirapxeiv eoiKe • - - ov fi6voP 
kv dvdpuTTOts dWa Kal iv opvioi Kal tols TrXet'oTOts tuv ^ucop, kuI tois 
ofioedveaL irpbs d\XT]\a^ Kal fidXicra rots dpdpujirois . . . eoiKC de Kal rds 
■jroXeis avvex^iv ij ^tXt'a, Kal ol vofioderai fxdWov wepl avT7j,v citovbd^eiv 
^ T^v diKaioffvpriv 



54 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

and watching the effect on his feelings of the discovery 
that a little Egyptian girl baby who died four thousand 
years ago rubbed the toes of her shoes by crawling upon 
the floor. 

The tactics of an election consist largely of contriv- 
ances by which this immediate emotion of personal 
affection may be set up. The candidate is advised to 
"show himself" continually, to give away prizes, to "say 
a few words" at the end of other people's speeches — all 
under circumstances which offer little or no opportunity 
for the formation of a reasoned opinion of his merits, 
but many opportunities for the rise of a purely instinc 
tive affection among those present. His portrait is 
periodically distributed, and is more effective if it is a 
good, that is to say, a distinctive, than if it is a flattering 
likeness. Best of all is a photograph which brings his 
ordinary existence sharply forward by representing 
him in his garden smoking a pipe or reading a news- 
paper. 

A simple-minded supporter whose affection has been 
so worked up will probably try to give an intellectual 
explanation of it. He will say that the man, of whom 
he may know really nothing except that he was photo- 
graphed in a Panama hat with a fox-terrier, is "the kind 
of man we want," and that therefore he has decided to 
support him; just as a child will say that he loves his 
mother because she is the best mother in the world,^ or 
a man in love will give an elaborate explanation of his 

1 A rather unusually reflective little girl of my acquaintance, felt, one 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 55 



perfectly normal feelings, which he describes as an 
intellectual inference from alleged abnormal excel- 
lences in his beloved. The candidate naturally intellec- 
tualizes in the same way. One of the most perfectly 
modest men I know once told me that he was "going 
round" a good deal among his future constituents "to 
let them see what a good fellow I am." Unless, indeed, 
the process can be intellectualized, it is for many men 
unintelligible. 

A monarch is a life-long candidate, and there exists 
a singularly elaborate traditional art of producing 
personal affection for him. It is more important that 
he should be seen than that he should speak or act. His 
portrait appears on every coin and stamp, and apart 
from any question of personal beauty, produces most 
effect when it is a good likeness. Any one, for instance, 
who can clearly recall his own emotions during the later 
years of Queen Victoria's reign, will remember a 
measurable increase of "his affection for her, when, in 
1897, a thoroughly life-like portrait took the place on 
the coins of the conventional head of 1837-1887, and 
the awkward compromise of the first Jubilee year. In 
the case of monarchy one can also watch the intellec- 
tualization of the whole process by the newspapers, the 
official biographers, the courtiers, and possibly the 

day, while looking at her mother, a strong impulse of affection. She 
first gave the usual intellectual explanation of her feeling, "Mummy, I do 
think you are the most beautiful Mummy in the whole world," and then, 
after a moment's thought, corrected herself by saying, "But there, they 
do say love is blind." 



56 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ 

monarch himself. The daily bulletion of details as to 
his walks and drives is, in reality, the more likely to 
create a vivid impression of his personality, and there- 
fore to produce this particular kind of emotion, the 
more ordinary the events described are in themselves. 
But since an emotion arising out of ordinary events is 
difficult to explain on a purely intellectual basis, these 
events are written about as revealing a life of extra- 
ordinary regularity and industry. When the affection 
is formed it is even sometimes described as an inevitable 
reasoned conclusion arising from reflection upon a reign 
during which there have been an unusual number of 
good harvests or great inventions. 

Sometimes the impulse of affection is excited to a 
point at which its non-rational character becomes 
obvious. George the Third was beloved by the English 
people because they realized intensely that, like them- 
selves, he had been born in England, and because the 
published facts of his daily life came home to them. 
Fanny Burney describes, therefore, how when, during 
an attack of madness, he was to be taken in a coach 
to Kew, the doctors who were to accompany him were 
seriously afraid that the inhabitants of any village who 
saw that the King was under restraint would attack 
them.- The kindred emotion of personal and dynastic 
loyalty (whose origin is possibly to be found in the fact 

^ Diary of Madame D'Arblay, ed. 1905, vol. iv, p. 184, "If they even 
attempted force, they had not a doubt but his smallest resistance would 
call up the whole country to his fancied rescue." 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 57 



that the loosely organized companies of our pre- 
human ancestors could not defend themselves from their 
carnivorous enemies until the general instinct of 
affection was specialized into a vehement impulse to 
follow and protect their leader), has again and again 
produced destructive and utterly useless civil wars. 

Fear often accompanies and, in politics, is confused 
with affection. A man, whose life's dream it has been 
to get sight and speech of his King, is accidentally 
brought face to face with him. He is "rooted to the 
spot," becomes pale, and is unable to speak, because a 
movement might have betrayed his ancestors to a lion 
or a bear, or earlier still, to a hungry cuttlefish. It 
would be an interesting experiment if some professor of 
experimental psychology would arrange his class in the 
laboratory with sphygmographs on their wrists ready to 
record those pulse movements which accompany the 
sensation of "thrill," and would then introduce into the 
room without notice, and in chance order, a bishop, a 
well-known general, the greatest living man of letters, 
and a minor member of the royal family. The resulting 
records of immediate pulse disturbances would be of 
real scientific importance, and it might even be possible 
to continue the record in each case say, for a quarter of 
a minute, and to trace the secondary effects of 
variations in political opinions, education, or the sense 
of humour among the students. At present almost the 
only really scientific observation on the subject from 
its political side is contained in Lord Palmerston's 



58 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

« » 

protest against a purely intellectual account of aristoc- 
racy: "there is no damned nonsense about merit," he 
said, "in the case of the Garter." Makers of new 
aristocracies are still, however, apt to intellectualize. 
The French government, for instance, have created an 
order, "Pour le Merite Agricole," which ought, on the 
basis of mere logic, to be very successful ; but one is told 
that the green ribbon of that order produces in France no 
thrill whatever. 

The impulse to laugh is comparatively unimportant 
in politics, but it affords a good instance of the way 
in which a practical politician has to allow for pre- 
rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate 
effect of the recognition of the incongruous, just as 
trembling is of the recognition of danger. It may have 
been evolved because an animal which suffered a slight 
spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more likely 
to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have 
been the merely accidental result of some fact in our 
nervous organization which was otherwise useful. 
Incongruity is, however, so much a matter of habit and 
association and individual variation, that it is extraordi- 
narily difficult to forecast whether any particular act 
will seem ridiculous to any particular class, or how 
long the sense of incongruity will in any case 
persist. Acts, for instance, which aim at producing 
exalted emotional effect among ordinary slow-witted 
people — Burke's dagger, Louis Napoleon's tame eagle, 
the German Kaiser's telegrams about Huns and mailed 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 59 

' -■ > 

fists — may do so, and therefore be in the end politically 
successful, although they produce spontaneous laughter 
in men whose conception of good political manners is 
based upon the idea of self-restraint. 

Again, almost the whole of the economic question 
between socialism and individualism turns on the nature 
and limitatons of the desire for property. There seem 
to be good grounds for supposing that this is a true 
specific instinct, and not merely the result of habit or 
of the intellectual choice of means for satisfying the 
desire of power. Children, for instance, quarrel 
furiously at a very early age over apparently worthless 
things, and collect and hide them long before they can 
have any clear notion of the advantages to be derived 
from individual possession. Those children who in 
certain charity schools are brought up entirely without 
personal property, even in their clothes or pocket- 
handkerchiefs, show every sign of the bad effect on 
health and character which results from complete 
inability to satisfy a strong inherited instinct. The 
evolutionary origin of the desire for property is indicated 
also by many of the habits of dogs or squirrels or 
magpies. Some economist ought therefore to give us a 
treatise in which this property instinct is carefully and 
quantitatively examined. Is it, like the hunting instinct, 
an impulse which dies away if it is not indulged? How 
far can it be eliminated or modified by education? Is 
it satisfied by a leasehold or a life-interest, or by such 
an arrangement of corporate property as is offered by 



60 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

a collegiate foundation or by the provision of a public 
park? Does it require for its satisfaction material 
and visible things such as land or houses, or is the 
holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is 
the absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more 
strongly in the case of personal chattels (such as furni- 
ture and ornaments) than in the case of land or 
machinery? Does the degree and direction of the 
instinct markedly differ among different individuals or 
races, or between the two sexes? 

Pending such an inquiry my own provisional opinion 
is that, like a good many instincts of very early evolu- 
tionary origin, it can be satisfied by an avowed pretence; 
just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk can be 
kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting 
instinct by playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil 
servant satisfies his instinct of combat and adventure 
at golf. If this is so, and if it is considered for 
other reasons undesirable to satisfy the property 
instinct by the possession, say, of slaves or of freehold 
land, one supposes that a good deal of the feeling of 
property may in the future be enjoyed, even by persons 
in whom the instinct is abnormally strong, through the 
collection of shells or of picture postcards. 

The property insitinct is, it happens, one of two 
instances in which the classical economists deseirted 
their usual habit of treating all desires as the result 
of a calculation of the means of obtaining "utility" or 
"wealth." The satisfaction of the instinct of absolute 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 61 



property by peasant proprietorship turned, they said, 
"sand to gold," although it required a larger expen- 
diture of labour for every unit of income than was the 
case in salaried employment. The other instance was 
the instinct of family affection. Tliis also still needs 
a special treatise on its stimulus, variation, and limita- 
tions. But the classical economists treated it as absolute 
and unvar}-ing. The "economic man," who had no more 
concern than a lone wolf with the rest of the human 
species, was treated as possessing a perfect and 
permanent solidarity of feeling with his "family." Tlie 
family was apparently assumed as consisting of those 
persons for whose support a man in Western Europe is 
legally responsible, and no attempt was made to estimate 
whether the instinct extended in any degree to cousins 
or great-uncles. 

A treatise on political impulses which aimed at 
completeness would further include at least the fight- 
ing instinct (with the part which it plays, together with 
affection and loyalty, in the formation of parties), and 
the instincts of suspicion, curiosity, and the desire to 
excel. 

All these primary impulses are greatly increased 
in immediate effectiveness when they are "pure," that is 
to say, unaccompanied by competing or opposing 
impulses; and this is the main reason why art, which 
aims at producing one emotion at a time, acts on most 
men so much more easily than does the more varied 
appeal of real life. I once sat in a suburban theatre 



62 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

> ' ' 

among a number of colonial troopers who had come 
over from South Africa for the King's Coronation. 
The play was "Our Boys," and between the acts my 
next neighbour gave me, without any sign of emotion, 
a hideous account of the scene at Tweef ontein after De 
Wet had rushed the British camp on the Christmas 
morning of 1901 — the militiamen slaughtered while 
drunk, and the Kaffir drivers tied to the blazing waggons. 
The curtain rose again, and, five minutes later, I saw 
that he was weeping in sympathy with the stage 
misfortunes of two able-bodied young men who had to 
eat "inferior Dorset" butter. My sympathy with the 
militiamen and the Kaffirs was "pure," whereas his was 
overlaid with remembered race-hatred, battle-fury, and 
contempt for British incompetence. His sympathy, on 
the other hand, with the stage characters was not 
accompanied, as mine was, by critical feelings about 
theatrical conventions, indifferent acting, and middle- 
Victorian sentiment. 

It is this greater immediate effect of pure and 
artificial as compared with mixed and concrete emotion 
which explains the traditional maxim of political 
agents that it is better that a candidate should not live 
in his constituency. It is an advantage that he should 
be able to represent himself as a "local candidate," but 
his local character should be ad hoc, and should consist 
in the hiring of a large house each year in which he 
lives a life of carefully dramatized hospitality. Things 
in no way blameworthy in themselves — his choice of 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 63 

tradesmen, his childrens' hats and measles, his difficulties 
'with his relations — will be, if he is a permanent 
resident, "out of the picture," and may confuse the 
impression which he produces. If one could, by the 
help of a time-machine, see for a moment in the flesh 
the little Egyptian girl who wore out her shoes, one 
might find her behaving so charmingly that one's pity 
for her death would be increased. But it is more 
probable that, even if she was, in fact, a very nice little 
girl, one would not. 

This greater immediate facility of the emotions set 
up by artistic presentment, as compared with those result- 
ing from concrete observation, has, however, to be 
studied in its relation to another fact — that impulses 
vary, in their driving force and in the depth of the 
nervous disturbance which they cause, in proportion, 
not to their importance in our present life, but to the 
point at which they appeared in our evolutionary past. 
We are quite unable to resist the impulse of mere 
vascular and nervous reaction, the watering of the 
mouth, the jerk of the limb, the closing of the eye, 
which we share with some of the simplest vertebrates. 
We can only with difficulty resist the instincts of sex and 
food, of anger and fear, which we share with the 
higher animals. It is, on the other hand, difficult for 
us to obey consistently the impulses which attend on the 
mental images formed by inference and association. 
A man may be convinced by a long train of cogent 
reasoning that he will go to hell if he visits a certain 



64 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

house; and yet he will do so in satisfaction of a half 
conscious craving whose existence he is ashamed to 
recognize. It may be that when a preacher makes hell 
real to him by physical images of fire and torment his 
conviction will acquire coercive force. But that force 
may soon die away as his memory fades, and even the 
most vivid description has little effect as compared 
with a touch of actual pain. At the theatre, because pure 
emotion is facile, three-quarters of the audience may 
cry, but because second-hand emotion is shallow, very 
few of them will be unable to sleep when they get home, 
or will even lose their appetite for a late supper. My 
South African trooper probably recovered from his tears 
over "Our Boys" as soon as they were shed. The 
transient and pleasurable quality of the tragic emotions 
produced by novel reading is ivell known. A man may 
weep over a novel which he will forget in two or three 
hours, although the same man may be made insane, or 
may have his character changed for life, by actual ex- 
periences which are far less terrible than those of which 
he reads, experiences which at the moment may produce 
neither tears nor any other obvious nervous effect. 

Both these facts are of first-rate political importance 
in those great modern communities in which all the 
events which stimulate political action reach the voters 
through newspapers. The emotional appeal of journal- 
ism, even more than that of the stage, is facile because it 
is pure, and transitory because it is second-hand. 
Battles and famines, murders and the evidence of 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 65 

inquiries into destitution, all are presented by the 
journalist in literary form, with a careful selection of 
'telling' detail. Their effect is therefore produced at 
once, in the half-hour that follows the middle-class 
breakfast, or in the longer interval on the Sunday mor- 
ning when the workman reads his weekly paper. But 
when the paper has been read the emotional effect fades 
rapidly away. 

Any candidate at an election feels for this reason the 
strangeness of the conditions under which what Professor 
James calls the "pungent sense of effective reality," ^ 
reaches or fails to reach, mankind, in a civilization based 
upon newspapers. I was walking along the street during 
my last election, thinking of the actual issues involved, 
and comparing them with the vague fog of journalistic 
phrases, and the half-conscious impulses of old habit 
and new suspicion which make up the atmosphere of 
electioneering. I came round a street corner upon a boy 
of about fifteen returning from work, whose whole face 
lit up with genuine and lively interest as soon as he saw 
me. I stopped, and he said: "I know you, Mr. Wallas, 
you put the medals on me." All that day political prin- 
ciples and arguments had refused to become real to my 
constituents, but the emotion excited by the bodily fact 
that I had at a school ceremony pinned a medal for good 

1 "The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact 
that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the 
truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not 
attach to certain ideas." W. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. 
p. 547. 



66 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■■' 

attendance on a boy's coat, had all the pungency of a 
first-hand experience. 

Throughout the contest the candidate is made aware, 
at every point, of the enormously greater solidity for 
most men of the work-a-day world which they see for 
themselves, as compared with the world of inference and 
secondary ideas which they see through the newspapers. 
A London County Councillor, for instance, as his election 
comes near, and he begins to withdraw from the daily 
business of administrative committees into the cloud of 
the electoral campaign, finds that the officials whom he 
leaves behind, with their daily stint of work, and their 
hopes and fears about their salaries, seem to him much 
more real than himself. The old woman at her door in a 
mean street who refuses to believe that he is not being 
paid for canvassing, the prosperous and good-natured 
tradesman who says quite simply, "I expect you find 
politics rather an expensive amusement," all seem to 
stand with their feet upon the ground. However often 
he assures himself that the great realities are on his side, 
and that the busy people round him are concerned only 
with fleeting appearances, yet the feeling constantly 
recurs to him that it is he himself who is living in a world 
of shadows. 

This feeling is increased by the fact that a candidate 
has constantly to repeat the same arguments, and to 
stimulate in himself the same emotions, and that mere 
repetition produces a distressing sense of unreality. 
The preachers who have to repeat every Sunday the same 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 67 



gospel, find also that "dry times" alternate with times of 
exaltation. Even among the voters the repetition of the 
same political thoughts is apt to produce weariness. The 
main cause of the recurring swing of the electoral pendu- 
lum seems to be that opinions which have been held with 
enthusiasm become after a year or two stale and flat, and 
that the new opinions seem fresh and vivid. 

A treatise is indeed required from some trained 
psychologist on the conditions under which our nervous 
system shows itself intolerant of repeated sensations 
and emotions. The fact is obviously connected with 
the purely physiological causes which produce giddiness, 
tickling, sea-sickness, etc. But many things that are 
"natural," that is to say, which we have constantly 
experienced during any considerable part of the ages 
during which our nervous organization was being 
developed, apparently do not so affect us. Our heart- 
beats, the taste of water, the rising and setting of the 
sun, or, in the case of a child, milk, or the presence of 
its mother, or of its brothers, do not seem to become, in 
sound health, distressingly monotonous. But "artificial" 
things, however pleasant at first — a tune on the piano, 
the pattern of a garment, the greeting of an acquaintance 
—are likely to become imbearable if often exactly 
repeated. A newspaper is an artificial thing in this 
sense, and one of the arts of the newspaper-writer 
consists in presenting his views with that kind of 
repetition which, like the phrases of a fugue, constantly 
approaches, but never oversteps the limit of monotony. \ 



68 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ — » 

Advertisers again are now discovering that it pays to 
vary the monotony with which a poster appeals to the 
eye by printing in different colours those copies which 
are to hang near each other, or still better, by repre- 
senting varied incidents in the career of "Sunny Jim" 
or "Sunlight Sue." 

A candidate is also an artificial thing. If he lives 
and works in his constituency, the daily vision of an 
otherwise admirable business man seated in a first- 
class carriage on the 8.47 A. M. train in the same attitude 
and reading the same newspaper may produce a slight 
and unrecognized feeling of discomfort among his 
constituents, although it would cause no such feeling in 
the wife whose relation to him is "natural." For the 
same reason when his election comes on, although he 
may declare himself to be the "old member standing on 
the old platform," he should be careful to avoid 
monotony by slightly varying his portrait, the form of 
his address, and the details of his declaration of political 
faith. 

Another fact, closely connected with our intolerance 
of repeated emotional adjustment, is the desire for 
privacy, sufficiently marked to approach the character 
of a specific instinct, and balanced by a corresponding 
and opposing dread of loneliness. Our ancestors in the 
ages during which our present nervous system became 
fixed, lived, apparently, in loosely organized family 
groups, associated for certain occasional purposes into 
larger, but still more loosely organized, tribal groups. 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 69 

No one slept alone, for the more or less monogamic 
family assembled nightly in a cave or "lean to" shelter. 
The hunt for food which filled the day was carried on, 
one supposes, neither in complete solitude nor in 
constant intercourse. Even if the female were left at 
home with the young, the male exchanged some dozen 
times a day rough greetings with acquaintances, or 
joined in a common task. Occasionally, even before 
the full development of language, excited palavers 
attended by some hundreds would take place, or oppo- 
sing tribes would gather for a fight. 

It is still extremely difficult for the normal man to 
endure either much less or much more than this amount 
of intercourse with his fellows. However safe they may 
know themselves to be, most men find it difficult to sleep 
in an empty house, and would be distressed by anything 
beyond three days of absolute solitude. Even habit 
cannot do much in this respect. A man required to 
submit to gradually increasing periods of solitary con- 
finement would probably go mad as soon as he had been 
kept for a year without a break. A settler, though he 
may be the son of a settler, and may have known no 
other way of living, can hardly endure existence 
unless his daily intercourse with his family is supple- 
mented by a weekly chat with a neighbour or a stranger; 
and he will go long and dangerous journeys in order once 
a year to enjoy the noise and bustle of a crowd. 

But, on the other hand, the nervous system of most 
men will not tolerate the frequent repetition of that 



70 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

adjustment of the mind and sympathies to new acquaint- 
anceship, a certain amount of which is so refreshing 
and so necessary. One can therefore watch in great 
modem cities men half consciously striving to preserve 
the same proportion between privacy and intercourse 
which prevailed among their ancestors in the woods, and 
one can watch also the constant appearance of proposals 
or experiments which altogether ignore the primary facts 
of human nature in this respect. The habitual intellec- 
tualism of the writers of political Utopias prevents 
them from seeing any "reason" why men should not find 
happiness as well as economy in a sort of huge 
extension of family life. The writer himself at his 
moments of greatest imaginative exaltation does not 
perhaps realize the need of privacy at all. His aif ections 
are in a state of expansion which, without fancifulness, 
one may refer back to the emotional atmosphere 
prevalent in the screaming assemblies of his pre-human 
ancestors ; and he is ready, so long as this condition lasts, 
to take the whole world almost literally to his bosom. 
What he does not realize is that neither he nor any 
one else can keep himself permanently at this level. 
In William Morris's "News from Nowhere" the customs 
of family life extend to the streets, and the tired student 
from the British Museum talks with easy intimacy to the 
thirsty dustman. I remember reading an article written 
about 1850 by one of the early Christian Socialists. He 
said that he had just been riding down Oxford Street in 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 71 

' -^—^ — -..^.— i— .^^— ^— «— < 

an omnibus, and that he had noticed that when the 
omnibus passed over a section of the street in which 
macadam had been substituted for paving, all the 
passengers turned and spoke to each other. "Some 
day," he said, "all Oxford street will be macadamized, 
and then, because men will be able to hear each other's 
voices, the omnibus will become a delightful informal 
club." Now nearly all London is paved with wood, 
and people as they sit in chairs on the top of omnibuses 
can hear each other whispering: but no event short of 
a fatal accident is held to justify a passenger who 
speaks to his neighbour. 

Clubs were established in London, not so much for 
the sake of the cheapness and convenience of common 
sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to bring together bodies 
of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on terms 
of unrestrained social intercourse. One can isee in 
Thackeray's "Book of Snobs," and in the stories of 
Thackeray's own club quarrels, the difficulties produced 
by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successful exactly 
because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of 
them that no member must speak to any other who is 
not one of his own personal acquaintances. The 
innumerable communistic experiments of Foumier, 
Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially be- 
cause of the want of privacy. The associates got on 
each other's nerves. In those confused pages of the 
"Politics," in which Aristotle criticizes from the point 



72 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

of view of experience the communism of Plato, the 
same point stands out: "It is difficult to live together 
in commjunity," communistic colonists have always "dis- 
puted with each other about the most ordinary mat- 
ters"; we most often disagree with those slaves who are 
brought into daily contact with us." ^ 

The Charity Schools of 1700 to 1850 were experiments 
in the result of a complete refusal of scope, not only 
for the instinct of property, but for the entirely distinct 
instinct of privacy, and part of their disastrous nervous 
and moral effect must be put down to that. The boys 
in the contemporary public boarding-schools secured a 
little privacy by the adoption of strange and some- 
times cruel social customs, and more has been done 
since then by systems of "studies" and "houses." 
Experience seems, however, to show that during child- 
hood a day school with its alternation of home, 
class-room, and playing field, is better suited than a 
boarding-school to the facts of normal human nature. 
This instinctive need of privacy is again a subject 
which would repay special and detailed study. It varies 
very greatly among different races, and one supposes 
that the much greater desire for privacy which is 
found among Northern, as compared to Southern 
Europeans, may be due to the fact that races who had 
to spend much or little of the year under cover, adjusted 
themselves biologically to a different standard in this 
respect. It is clear, also, that it is our emotional nature, 

1 Politics, Book ii. ch. v. 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 73 

and not the intellectual or muscular organs of talking, 
which is most easily fatigued. Light chatter, even 
among strangers, in which neither party "gives himself 
away," is very much less fatiguing than an intimacy 
which makes some call upon the emotions. An 
actor who accepts the second alternative of Diderot's 
paradox, and feels his part, is much more likely to break 
down from overstrain, than one who only simulates 
feeling and keeps his own emotional life to himself. 

It is in democratic politics, however, that privacy is 
most neglected, most difficult, and most necessary. In 
America all observers are agreed as to the danger which 
results from looking on a politician as an abstract 
personification of the will of the people, to whom all 
citizens have an equal and inalienable right of access, 
and from whom every one ought to receive an equally 
warm and sincere welcome. In England our compara- 
tively aristocratic tradition as to the relation between 
a representative and his constituents has done something 
to preserve customs corresponding more closely to the 
actual nature of man. A tired English statesman at a 
big reception is still allowed to spend his time rather 
in chaffing with a few friends in a distant comer of the 
room than in shaking hands and exchanging effusive 
commonplaces with innumerable unknown guests. But 
there is a real danger lest this tradition of privacy 
may be abolished in English democracy, simply because 
of its connection with aristocratic manners. A young 
labour politician is expected to live in more than 



74 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

American conditions of intimate publicity. Having, 
perhaps, just left the working bench, and having to 
adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficult 
requirements of mental work, he is expected to receive 
every caller at any hour of the day or night with the 
same hearty good will, and to be always ready to share 
or excite the enthusiasm of his followers. After a year 
or two, in the case of a man of sensitive organization, the 
task is found to be impossible. The signs of nervous 
fatigue are at first accepted by him and his friends as 
proofs of his sincerity. He begins to suffer from the 
curate's disease, the bright-eyed, hysterical condition 
in which a man talks all day long to a succession of 
sympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts 
into actual ill-health, though he is not making an hour's 
continuous exertion in the day. I knew a young agita- 
tor in that state who thought that he could not make a 
propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, 
in whose cottage he was staying, played the Marseillaise 
on a harmonium before he started. Often such a man 
takes to drink. In any case he is liable, as the East 
End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, 
to the most pitiable forms of moral collapse. 

Such men, however, are those who being unfit for a 
life without privacy, do not survive. Greater political 
danger comes perhaps from those who are comparatively 
fit. Anyone who has been in America, who has stood 
among the crowd in a Philadelphia law-court during the 
trial of a political case, or has seen the thousands of 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 75 



cartoons in a contest in which Tammany is concerned, 
will find that he has a picture in his mind of one type 
at least of those who do survive. Powerfully built, 
with the big jaw and loose mouth of the dominant 
talker, practised by years of sitting behind saloon bars, 
they have learnt the way of "selling cheap that which 
should be most dear." But even they generally 
look as if they drank, and as if they would not live to 
old age. 

Other and less dreadful types of politicians without 
privacy come into one's mind, the orator who night after 
night repeats the theatrical success of his own personal- 
ity, and, like the actor, keeps his recurring fits of weary 
disgust to himself; the busy organizing talkative man 
to whom it is a mere delight to take the chair at four 
smoking concerts a week. But there is no one of them 
who would not be the better, both in health and working 
power, if he were compelled to retire for six months 
from the public view, and to produce something with 
his own hand and brain, or even to sit alone in his 
own house and think. 

These facts, in so far as they represent the nervous 
disturbance produced by certain conditions of life in 
political communities, are again closely connected with 
the one point in the special psychology of politics which 
has as yet received any extensive consideration — the 
so-called "Psychology of the Crowd," on which the late 
M. Tarde, M. Le Bon, and others have written. In the 
case of human beings, as in the case of many other 



76 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

social and semi-social animals, the simpler impulses — 
especially those of fear and anger — ^when they are 
consciously shared by many physically associated 
individuals, may become enormously exalted, and may 
give rise to violent nervous disturbances. One may 
suppose that this fact, like the existence of laughter, was 
originally an accidental and undesirable result of the 
mechanism of nervous reaction, and that it persisted 
because when a common danger was realized (a forest 
fire, for instance, or an attack by beasts of prey), a 
general stampede, although it might be fatal to the 
weaker members of the herd, was the best chance of 
safety for the majority. 

My own observation of English politics suggests that 
in a modem national state, this panic effect of the com- 
bination of nervous excitement with physical contact 
is not of great importance. London in the twentieth 
century is very unlike Paris in the eighteenth century, 
or Florence in the fourteenth, if only because it is very 
difficult for any considerable proportion of the citizens 
to be gathered under circumstances likely to produce 
the special "Psychology of the Crowd." I have watched 
two hundred thousand men assembled in Hyde Park 
for a Labour Demonstration. The scattered platforms, 
the fresh air, the wide grassy space, seemed to be an 
unsuitable environment for the production of purely 
instinctive excitement, and the attitude of such an 
assembly in London is good-tempered and lethargic. A 
crowd in a narrow street is more likely to get "out of 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 77 



hand," and one may see a few thousand men in a large 
hail reach a state approaching genuine pathological 
exaltation on an exciting occasion, and when they are in 
the hands of a practised speaker. But as they go out 
of the hall they drop into the cool ocean of London, and 
their mood is dissipated in a moment. The mob that 
took the Bastille would not seem or feel an overwhelming 
force in one of the business streets of Manchester. Yet 
such facts vary greatly among different races, and the 
exaggeration which one seems to notice when reading 
the French sociologists on this point may be due to their 
observations having been made among a Latin and not 
a Northern race. 

So far I have dealt with the impulses illustrated by 
the internal politics of a modem state. But perhaps 
the most important section in the whole psychology of 
political impulse is that which is concerned not with 
the emotional effect of the citizens of any state upon 
each other, but with those racial feelings which reveal 
themselves in international politics. The future peace 
of the world largely turns on the question whether we 
have, as is sometimes said and often assumed, an 
instinctive affection for those human beings whose fea- 
tures and colour are like our own, combined with an 
instinctive hatred for those who are unlike us. On this 
point, pending a careful examination of the evidence 
by the psychologists, it is difficult to dogmatize. But 
I am inclined to think that those strong and apparently 
simple cases of racial hatred and affection which can 



78 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

certainly be found, are not instances of a specific and 
universal instinct, but the result of several distinct and 
comparatively weak instincts combined and heightened 
by habit and association. I have already argued that 
the instinct of political affection is stimulated by the 
vivid realization of its object. Since therefore it is 
easier, at least for uneducated men, to realize the exist- 
ence of beings like than of beings unlike themselves, 
affection for one's like would appear to have a natural 
basis, but one likely to be modified as our powers of 
realization are stimulated by education. 

Again, since most men live, especially in childhood, 
among persons belonging to the same race as themselves, 
any markedly unusual face or dress may excite the in- 
stinct of fear of that which is unknown. A child's fear, 
however, of a strangely shaped or coloured face is more 
easily obliterated by familiarity than it would be if it 
were the result of a specific instinct of race-hatred. 
White or Chinese children show, one is told, no perman- 
ent aversion for Chinese or white or Hindoo or negro 
nurses and attendants. Sex love, again, even when op- 
posed by social tradition, springs up freely between very 
different human types; and widely separated races have 
been thereby amalgamated. Between some of the non- 
human species (horses and camels, for instance) instinc- 
tive mutual hatred, as distinguished from fear, does 
seem to exist, but nowhere, as far as I know, is it found 
between varieties so nearly related to each other and so 
readily interbreeding as the various human races. 



IMPULSE AND INSTINCT 79 



Anglo-Indian officials sometimes explain, as a case 
of specific instinct, the fact that a man who goes out 
with an enthusiastic interest in the native races often 
finds himself, after a few years, unwillingly yielding 
to a hatred of the Hindoo racial type. But the account 
which they give of their sensations seems to me more 
like the nervous disgust which I described as arising 
from a constantly repeated mental and emotional 
adjustment to inharmonious surroundings. At the age 
when an English official reaches India most of his 
emotional habits are already set, and he makes, as a 
rule, no systematic attempt to modify them. There- 
fore, just as the unfamiliarity of French cookery or 
German beds, which at the beginning of a continental 
visit is a delightful change, may become after a month 
or two an intolerable gene, so the servility and untruth- 
fulness, and even the patience and cleverness of those 
natives with whom he is brought into official contact, 
get after a few years on the nerves of an Anglo-Indian. 
Intimate and uninterrupted contact during a long 
period, after his social habits have been formed, with 
people of his own race but of a different social tradi- 
tion would produce the same effect. 

Perhaps, however, intellectual association is a larger 
factor than instinct in the causation of racial affection 
and hatred. An American working man associates, 
for instance, the Far Eastern physical type with that 
lowering of the standard wage which overshadows as a 
dreadful possibility every trade in the industrial world. 



80 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



Fifty years ago the middle class readers to whom 
Punch appeals associated the same type with stories 
of tortured missionaries and envoys. After the battle 
of the Sea of Japan they associated it with that kind 
of heroism which, owing to our geographical positiion, 
we most admire; and drawings of the unmistakably 
Asiatic features of Admiral Togo, which would have 
excited genuine and apparently instinctive disgust in 
1859, produced a thrill of affection in 1906. 

But at this point we approach that discussion of the 
objects, sensible or imaginary, of political impulse (as 
distinguished from the impulses themselves), which 
must be reserved for my next chapter. 



CHAPTER II 
POLITICAL ENTITIES 

Man's impulses and thoughts and acts result from the 
relation between his nature and the environment into 
which he is bom. The last chapter approached that 
relation (in so far as it affects politics) from the side 
of man's nature. This chapter will approach the same 
relation from the side of man's political environment. 

The two lines of approach have this important 
difference, that the nature with which man is bom is 
looked on by the politician as fixed, while the environ- 
ment into which man is born is rapidly and indefinitely 
changing. It is not to changes in our nature, but to 
changes in our environment only — using the word to 
include the traditions and expedients which we acquire 
after birth as well as our material surroundings — ^that 
all our political development from the tribal organiza- 
tion of the Stone Ages to the modem nation has appar- 
ently been due. 

The biologist looks on human nature itself as chang- 
ing, but to him the period of a few thousands or tens 
of thousands of years which constitute the past of 
politics is quite insignificant. Important changes in 
biological types may perhaps have occurred in the his- 

81 



82 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

tory of the world during comparatively short periods, 
but they must have resulted either from a sudden biologi- 
cal "sport" or from a process of selection fiercer and 
more discriminating than we believe to have taken place 
in the immediate past of our own species. The present 
descendants of those races which are pictured in early 
Egyptian tombs show no perceptible change in their 
bodily appearance, and there is no reason to believe 
that the mental faculties and tendencies with which they 
are born have changed to any greater degree. 

The numerical proportions of different races in the 
world have, indeed, altered during that period, as one 
race proved weaker in war or less able to resist disease 
than another; and races have been mingled by marriage 
following upon conquest. But if a baby could now be 
exchanged at birth with one bom of the same breeding- 
stock even a hundred thousand years ago, one may 
suppose that neither the ancient nor the modem mother 
would notice any startling difference. The child from 
the Stone Age would perhaps suffer more seriously than 
our children if he caught measles, or might show some- 
what keener instincts in quarrelling and hunting, or as 
he grew up be rather more conscious than his fellows 
of the "will to live" and "the joy of life." Conversely, 
a transplanted twentieth-century child would resist 
infectious disease better than the other children in the 
Stone Age, and might, as he grew up, be foimd to have 
a rather exceptionally colourless and adaptable char- 
acter. But there apparently the difference would end. 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 83 

Li essentials the type of each human stock may be sup- 
posed to have remained unchanged throughout the 
the whole period. In the politics of the distant future 
that science of eugenics which aims at rapidly improv- 
ing our type by consciously directed selective breeding 
may become a dominant factor, but it has had little 
influence on the politics of the present or the past. 

Those new facts in our environment which have pro- 
duced the enormous political changes which separate 
us from our ancestors have been partly new habits of 
thought and feeling, and partly new entities about which 
we can think and feel. 

It is of these new political entities that this chapter 
will treat. They must have first reached us through 
our senses, and in this case almost entirely through 
the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like other 
animals, lives in an unending stream of sense impres- 
sions, of innumerable sights and sounds and feelings, 
and is only stirred to deed or thought by those which 
he recognizes as significant to him. How then did the 
new impressions separate themselves from the rest and 
become sufficiently significant to produce political 
results? 

The first requisite in anything which is to stimulate 
us toward impulse or action is that it should be recog- 
nizable — that it should be like itself when we met it 
before, or like something else which we have met before. 
If the world consisted of things which constantly and 
arbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever 



84 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

like anything else, or like itself for more than a moment 
at a time, living beings as at present constituted would 
not act at all. They would drift like seaweed among 
the waves. 

The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of 
the hawk, because one hawk is like another. Animals 
wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is like another; 
and find nuts or grass for food, because each nut and 
blade of grass is like the rest. 

But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a suf- 
ficient stimulus to action. The thing recognized must 
also be significant, must be felt in some way to matter 
to us. The stars re-appear nightly in the heavens, but, 
as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated 
to action by recognizing them. The moth is not stimu- 
lated by recognizing a tortoise, nor the cow by a cob- 
web. 

Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated 
to us by nature. The growl of a wild beast, the sight 
of blood, the cry of a child in distress, stand out, with- 
out need of experience or teaching, from the stream 
of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-club, the 
movement or glimpse of a rabbit among the under- 
growth separates itself at once from the sounds of the 
wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers. Some- 
times the significance of a sensation has to be learned 
by the individual animal during its own life, as when 
a dog, who recognizes the significance of a rat by 
instinct, learns to recognize that of a whip (provided 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 85 

i 

it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) 
by experience and association. 

In politics man has to make like things as well as 
to learn their significance. Political tactics would 
indeed be a much simpler matter if ballot-papers were 
a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paper 
at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never 
heard of one before were invariably seized with a desire 
to vote. 

The whole ritual of social and political organization 
among savages, therefore, illustrates the process of 
creating artificial and easily recognizable political like- 
nesses. If the chief is to be recognized as a chief he 
must, like the ghost of Patroclus, "be exceedingly like 
unto himself." He must live in the same house, wear 
the same clothes, and do the same things year by year; 
and his successor must imitate him. If a marriage or 
an act of sale is to be recognized as a contract, it must 
be carried out in the customary place and with the cus- 
tomary gestures. In some few cases the things thus arti- 
ficially brought into existence and made recognizable 
still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those bio- 
logically inherited associations which enable man and 
other animals to interpret sensations without experience. 
The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, 
or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the 
smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive 
nature. But even in very early societies the recognition 
of artificial political entities must generally have owed 



86 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

its power of stimulating impulse to associations acquired 
during life. A child who had been beaten by the her- 
ald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the 
king or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the 
king, or the stone by association. 

Recognition often attaches itself to certain special 
points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) 
in the thing recognized. Such points then become sym- 
bols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionary facts 
of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh- 
eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing 
symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a 
flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp 
if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off 
birds.^ In early political society most recognition is 
guided by such symbols. One cannot make a new king, 
who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, 
who may have been an old man. But one can tattoo 
both of them with the same pattern. It is even more 
easy and less painful to attach a symbol to a king which 
is not a part of the man himself, a royal staff for 
instance, which may be decorated and enlarged until 
it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. 
The king is then recognized as king because he is the 
"staff-bearer" (o-KTyTrroiJxos /Jao-iAevs). Such a staff is 
very like a name, and there may, perhaps, have been 

1 C/. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. p. 392: — "The 
whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the history of 
our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of everything by 
its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them." 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 87 

an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which a 
model of a staff stood for a king. 

At this point it is already difficult not to intellec- 
tualize the whole process. Our "common-sense" 
and the systematized common-sense of the eighteenth- 
century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tri- 
bal man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded 
thereby of the original social contact between ruler 
and ruled, or of the pleasure and pain which experience 
had showTi to be derived from royal leadership and royal 
punishment,' and that he therefore decided by a process 
of reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king. 

When the symbol by which our impulse is stimu- 
lated is actual language, it is still more difficult not 
to confuse acquired emotional association with the full 
process of logical inference. Because one of the effects 
of those sounds and signs which we call language is 
to stimulate in us a process of deliberate logical thought 
we tend to ignore all their other effects. Nothing is 
easier than to make a description of the logical use of 
language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle 
of sensations — one's memory, for instance, of a royal 
person; the selection of a single quality — kingship, for 
instance — shared by other such bundles of sensations, 
the giving to that quality the name king, and the use of 
the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstrac- 
tion. When we are consciously trying to reason cor- 
rectly by the use of language all this does occur, just 
as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of voice- 



88 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid 
logic of colours and models and pictures. But any 
text-book of psychology will explain why it errs, both 
by excess and defect, if taken as a description of that 
which actually happens when language is used for the 
purpose of stimulating us to action. 

Indeed the "brass-instrument psychologists," who do 
such admirable work in their laboratories, have invented 
an experiment on the effect of significant words which 
every one may try for himself. Let him get a friend 
to write in large letters on cards a series of common 
political terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. 
Let him then sit before a watch recording tenths of 
seconds, turn up the cards, and practise observation of 
the associations which successively enter his conscious- 
ness. The first associations revealed will be automatic 
and obviously "illogical." If the word be "England" 
the white and black marks on the paper will, if the 
experimenter is a "visualizer," produce at once a picture 
of some kind accompanied by a vague and half con- 
scious emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or 
anxiety, or the remembrance of puzzled thought. If 
the experimenter is "audile," the marks will first call 
up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional 
reaction may be associated. I am a "visualizer," and 
the picture in my case was a blurred triangular outline. 
Other "visualizers" have described to me the picture of 
a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway 
carriage), as automatically called up by the word Eng- 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 89 

land. After the automatic picture or sound image and 
its purely automatic emotional accompaniment comes 
the "meaning" of the word, the things one knows about 
England, which are presented to the memory by a pro- 
cess semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is 
exhausted a severe effort. The question as to what 
images and feelings shall appear at each stage is, of 
course, settled by all the tlioughts and events of our 
past life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at 
least of the experiment, before we have time con- 
sciously to reflect or choose. 

A corresponding process may be set up by other 
symbols besides language. If in the experiment the 
hats belonging to members of a family be substituted 
for the written cards, the rest of the process will go 
on — the automatic "image," automatically accompanied 
by emotional association, being succeeded in the course 
of a second or so by the voluntar}^ realization of "mean- 
ing," and finally by a deliberate effort of recollection 
and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a bom 
poet, and partly perhaps because his excessive use of 
tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, 
was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those 
separate mental states which for most men are merged 
into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the "Prin- 
cess," describes the succession w^hich I have been discuss- 
ing: — 

'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums, 
That beat to battle where he stands. 



90 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

, < II I 

Thy face across his fancy comes, 

And gives the battle to his hands: 
A moment, white the trumpets blow, 

He sees his brood about thy knee; 
The next, like fire he meets the foe. 

And strikes him dead for thine and thee.' 

"Thine and thee" at the end seem to me to express 
precisely the change from the automatic images of 
"voice" and "face" to the reflective mood in which the 
full meaning of that for which he fights is realized. 

But it is the "face" that "gives the battle to his hands." 
Here again, as we saw when comparing impulses them- 
selves, it is the evolutionarily earlier, more automatic, 
fact that has the greater, and the later intellectual fact 
which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits 
in one's chair one can feel that that is so. 

Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the 
phenomena of religion. The only religion of any im- 
portance which has ever been consciously constructed 
by a psychologist is the Positivism of Auguste Gomte. 
In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to 
ensure moral action among the distractions and tempta- 
tions of daily life, he required each of his disciples to 
make for himself a visual image of Humanity. The 
disciple was to practise mental contemplation, for a 
definite period each morning, of the remembered figure ^ 
of some known and loved woman — ^his mother, or wife, 
or sister. He was to keep the figure always in the same 
attitude and dress, so that it should always present itself 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 91 



automatically as a definite mental image in immediate 
association with the word Humanite.^ With that would 
be automatically associated the original impulse of affec- 
tion for the person imaged. As soon as possible after 
that would come the meaning of the word, and the fuller 
but less cogent emotional associations connected with 
that meaning. This invention was partly borrowed from 
certain forms of mental discipline in the Roman Catholic 
Church, and partly suggested by Comte's own experi- 
ences of the effect on him of the image of Madame de 
Vaux. One of the reasons that it has not come into 
greater use may have been that men in general are not 
quite such good "visualizers" as Comte found himself 
to be. 

Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating passage of his 
Apologia, explains how he made for himself images of 
personified nations, and hints that behind his belief in 
the real existence of such images was his sense of the 
convenience of creating them. He says that he identi- 
fied the ''character and the instinct" of "states and gov- 
ernments" and of those "religious communities," from 
which he suffered so much, with spirits "partially fallen, 
capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or 
malicious, as the case might be. . . . My preference 
of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead 
me to this view. I thought it countenanced by the men- 

^The Catechism of Positive Religi-on (Tr. by Congreve), First Part, 
"Explanation of the Worship." e.g. p. 65: "The Positivist shuts his 
eyes during his private prayers, the better to see the internal image.'* 



92 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

tion of the 'Prince of Persia' in the prophet Daniel: 
and I think I considered that it was of such intermediate 
beings that the Apocalypse spoke, when it introduced 
'the angels of the seven churches.' 

"In 1837 ... I said . . . 'Take England with many- 
high virtues and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me 
that John Bull is a spirit neither of Heaven nor Hell.' " ^ 

Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes 
of the expansion of Christianity, lays stress on the use 
of the word "church" and the "possibilities of personifi- 
cation which it offered. ^ This use may have owed its 
origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstraction 
applied by some Christian philosopher to the common 
qualities of all Christian congregations, though it more 
likely resulted from a half conscious process of adapta- 
tion in the employment of a current term. But when it 
was established the word owed its tremendous power 
over most men to the emotions automatically stimulated 
by the personification, and not to those which would 
follow on a full analysis of the meaning. Religious 
history affords innumerable such instances. The "truth 
embodied in a tale" has more emotional power than the 
unembodied truth, and the visual realization of the cen- 
tral figure of the tale more power than the tale itself. 
The sound-image of a sacred name at which "every knee 
shall bow," or even of one which may be formed in the 
mind but may not be uttered by the lips, has more 

1 Newman, Apologia (1864), pp.91, 92. 

^Hamack, Expansion of Christianity (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11. 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 93 

power at the moment of intensest feeling than the real- 
ization of its meaning. Things of the sense — the sa- 
cred food which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar 
whom one can see and touch, are apt to be more real than 
their heavenly anti-types. 

If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, 
we again discover how much harder it is there than in 
religion, or morals, or education, to resist the habit of 
giving intellectual explanations of emotional experi- 
ences. For most men the central political entity is their 
country. When a man dies for his country, what does 
he die for? The reader in his chair thinks of the size 
and climate, the history and population, of some region 
in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by 
his relation to all these things. But what seems to hap- 
pen in the crisis of battle is not the logical building up 
or analyzing of the idea of one's country, but that auto- 
matic selection by the mind of some thing of sense 
accompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affec- 
tion which I have already described. Throughout his 
life the conscript has lived in a stream of sensations, the 
printed pages of the geography book, the sight of streets 
and fields and faces, the sound of voices or of birds or 
rivers, all of which go to make up the infinity of facts 
from which he might abstract an idea of his country. 
What comes to him in the final charge? Perhaps the 
row of pollard elms behind his birth-place. More likely 
some personification of his country, some expedient of 
custom or imagination for enabling an entity which one 



94 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

u I 

can love to stand out from the unrealized welter of 
experience. If he is an Italian it may be the name, the 
musical syllables, of Italia. If he is a Frenchman, it 
may be the marble figure of France with her broken 
sword, as he saw it in the mai4cet-square of his native 
town, or the maddening pulse of the "Marseillaise." 
Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed 
staff. Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound 
of the pipes. 

Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a 
funeral crowd after the fighting is over, and his heart 
may stir within him as he hears Pericles abstract from 
the million qualities of individual Athenians in the pres- 
ent and the past just those that make the meaning of 
Athens to the world. But afterwards all that he will 
remember may be the cadence of Pericles' voice, the 
movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some mother 
of the dead. 

In the evolution of politics, among the most impor- 
tant events have been the successive creations of new 
moral entities — of such ideals as justice, freedom, right. 
In their origin that process of conscious logical abstrac- 
tion, which we are tempted to accept as the explanation 
of all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in 
great part to the historical fact. We have, for instance, 
contemporary accounts of the conversations in which 
Socrates compared and analysed the unwilling answers 
of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word 
Justice was made by his work an infinitely more effec- 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 95 

tive political term. It is certain too that for many- 
centuries before Socrates the slow adaptation of the same 
word by common use was from time to time quickened 
by some forgotten wise man who brought to bear upon 
it the intolerable effort of conscious thought. But as 
soon as, at each stage, the work was done, and Justice, 
like a rock statue on which successive generations of 
artists have toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she 
was seen not as an abstraction but as a direct revelation. 
It is true that this revelation made the older symbols 
mean and dead, but that which overcame them seemed 
a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of com- 
parison and analysis. Antigone in the play defied in 
the name of Justice the command which the sceptre-bear- 
ing king had sent through the sacred person of his her- 
ald. But Justice to her was a goddess, "housemate of 
the nether gods" — and the sons of those Athenian citi- 
zens who applauded the Antigone condemned Socrates 
to death because his dialectic turned the gods back into 
abstractions. 

The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spirit- 
ual supremacy to the fact that they were able to present 
a moral idea with intense emotional force without stif- 
fening it into a personification; but that was because 
they saw it always in relation to the most personal of all 
gods. Amos wrote, "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I 
will not smell the savour of your assemblies .... Take 
thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will 
not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll 



96 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

down as waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing 
stream." ^ Here "judgment" and "righteousness" are 
not goddesses ; but the voice which Amos heard was not 
the voice of an abstraction. 

Sometimes a new moral or political entity is created 
rather by immediate insight than by the slow process 
of deliberate analysis. Some seer of genius perceives 
in a flash the essential likeness of things hitherto kept 
apart in men's mind — the impulse which leads to anger 
with one's brother, and that which leads to murder, the 
charity of the widow's mite and of the rich man's gold, 
the intemperance of the debauchee and of the party 
leader. But when the master dies the vision too often 
dies with him. Plato's "ideas" became the formulae 
of a system of magic, and the command of Jesus that 
one should give all that one had to the poor handed 
over one-third of the land of Europe to be the untaxed 
property of wealthy ecclesiastics. 

It is this last relation between words and things 
which makes the central difficulty of thought about 
politics. The words are so rigid, so easily personified, 
so associated with aff'ection and prejudice; the things 
symbolized by the words are so unstable. The moralist 
or the teacher deals, as a Greek would say, for the most 
part, with "natural," the politician always with "con- 
ventional" species. If one forgets the meaning of 
motherhood or childhood. Nature has yet made for us 
immistakable mothers and children who reappear, true 
1 Amos, ch. v., vs. 21, 23, 24 (R. V. M.) . 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 97 

to type, in each generation. The chemist can make 
sure whether he is using a word in precisely the same 
sense as his predecessor by a few minutes' work in his 
laboratory. But in politics the thing named is always 
changing, may indeed disappear and may require hun- 
dreds of years to restore. Aristotle defined the word 
"polity" to mean a state where "the citizens as a body 
govern in accordance with the general good." ^ As he 
wrote, self-government in those States from which he 
abstracted the idea was already withering beneath the 
powder of Macedonia. Soon there were no such States at 
all, and, now that we are struggling back to Aristotle's 
conception, the name which he defined is borne by the 
"police" of Odessa. It is no mere accident of philology 
that makes "Justices' Justice" a paradox. From the 
time that the Roman jurisconsults resumed the work of 
the Greek philosophers, and by laborious question and 
answer built up the conception of "natural justice," it, 
like all other political conceptions, was exposed to the 
two dangers. On the one hand, since the original effort 
of abstraction was in its completeness incommunicable, 
each generation of users of the word subtly changed its 
use. On the other hand, the actions and institutions 
of mankind, from which the conception was abstracted, 
were as subtly changing. Even although the manu- 
scripts of the Roman lawyers survived, Roman law and 
Roman institutions had both ceased to be. When the 
phrases of Justinian were used by a Merovingian king or 
\ ^Politics, Bk. III. ch. vii. 



98 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

- 

a Spanish Inquisitor, not only was the meaning of the 
words changed, but the facts to which the words could 
have applied in their old sense were gone. Yet the emo- 
tional power of the bare words remained. The civil law 
and canon law of the Middle Ages were able to enforce 
all kinds of abuses because the tradition of reverence 
still attached itself to the sound of "Rome." For hun- 
dreds of years, one among the German princes was made 
somewhat more powerful than his neighbours by the 
fact that he was "Roman Emperor," and was called by 
the name of Caesar. 

The same difficulties and uncertainties as those which 
influence the history of a political entity when once 
formed confront the statesman who is engaged in making 
a new one. The great men. Stein, Bismarck, Cavour, 
or Metternich, who throughout the nineteenth century 
worked at the reconstruction of the Europe which 
Napoleon's conquests shattered, had to build up new 
States which men should respect and love, whose gov- 
ernments they should willingly obey, and for whose 
continued existence they should be prepared to die in 
battle. Races and languages and religions were inter- 
mingled throughout central Europe, and the historical 
memories of the kingdoms and dukedoms and bishop- 
rics into which the map was divided were confused 
and unexciting. Nothing was easier than to produce 
and distribute new flags and coins and national names. 
But the emotional eff'ect of such things depends upon 
associations which require time to produce, and which 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 99 

may have to contend against associations already- 
existing. The boy in Lombardy or Galicia saw the 
soldiers and the schoolmaster salute the Austrian flag, 
but the real thrill came when he heard his father or 
mother whisper the name of Italy or Poland. Perhaps, 
as in the case of Hanover, the old associations and the 
new are for many years almost equally balanced. 

In such times men fall back from the immediate 
emotional association of the national name and search 
for its meaning. They ask what is the Austrian or the 
German Empire. As long as there was only one Pope 
men handed on unexamined the old reverence from 
father to son. When for forty years there had been two 
Popes, at Rome and at Avignon, men began to ask what 
constituted a Pope. And in such times some men go 
further still. They may ask not only what is the mean- 
ing of the word Austrian Empire, or Pope, but what 
in the nature of things is the ultimate reason why the 
Austrian Empire or the Papacy should exist. 

The work therefore of nation-building must be carried 
forward on each plane. The national name and flag 
and anthem and coinage all have their entirely non- 
logical effect based on habitual association. Mean- 
while the statesmen strive to create as much meaning 
as possible for such symbols. If all the subjects of a 
State serve in one army and speak, or understand, one 
language, or even use a black-letter alphabet which 
has been abandoned elsewhere, the national name will 
mean more to them. The Saxon or the Savoyard will 



100 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



have a fuller answer to give himself when he asks 
"What does it mean, that I am a German or a French- 
man?" A single successful war waged in common will 
create not only a common history, but a common inherit- 
ance of passionate feeling. "Nationalists," meanwhile, 
may be striving, by songs and pictures and appeals to the 
past, to revive and intensify the emotional associations 
connected with older national areas — and behind all 
this will go on the deliberate philosophical discussion of 
the advantages to be derived from large or small, racial 
or regional States, which will reach the statesman at 
second-hand and the citizen at third-hand. As a 
result, Italy, Belgium, and the German Empire succeed 
in establishing themselves as States resting, upon a 
sufficient basis of patriotism, and Austria-Hungary may, 
when the time of stress comes, be found to have failed. 
But if the task of State building in Europe during 
the nineteenth century was difficult, still more difficult 
is the task before the English statesman of the twentieth 
century of creating an imperial patriotism. We have 
not even a name, with any emotional associations, for 
the United Kingdom itself. No Englishman is stirred 
by the name "British," the name "English" irritates all 
Scotchmen, and the Irish are irritated by both alike. 
Our national anthem is a peculiarly flat and uninspiring 
specimen of eighteenth-century opera libretto and opera 
music. The little naked St. George on the gold coins, 
or the armorial pattern on the silver coins never inspired 
any one. The new copper coinage bears, it is true, a 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 101 



graceful figure of Miss Hicks Beach. But we have made 
it so small and ladylike that it has none of the emotional 
force of the glorious portrait heads of France or Switzer- 
land. 

The only personification of his nation which the 
artisan of Oldham or Middlesbrough can recognize is 
the picture of John Bull as a fat, brutal, early nine- 
teenth-century Midland farmer. One of our national 
symbols alone, the "Union Jack," though it is as destitute 
of beauty as a patchwork quilt, is fairly satisfactory. 
But all its associations so far are with naval warfare. 

When we go outside the United Kingdom we are in 
still worse case. "The United Kingdom of Great Britain 
and Ireland together with its Colonies and Dependencies" 
has no shorter or more inspiring name. Throughout the 
Colonial Conference of 1907 statesman and leader writ- 
ers tried every expedient of periphrasis and allusion to 
avoid hurting any one's feelings even by using such a 
term as "British Empire." To the Sydney Bulletin, and 
to the caricaturists of Europe, the fact that any territory 
on the map of the world is coloured red still recalls 
nothing but the little greedy eyes, huge mouth, and 
gorilla hands of "John Bull." 

If, again, the young Boer or Hindoo or ex-American 
Canadian asks himself what is the meaning of member- 
ship ("citizenship," as applied to five-sixths of the 
inhabitants of the Empire, would be misleading) of the 
Empire, he finds it extraordinarily difficult to give an 
answer. When he goes deeper and asks for what 



102 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

purpose the Empire exists, he is apt to be told that the 
inhabitants of Great Britain conquered half the world 
in a fit of absence of mind and have not yet had time to 
think out an ex post facto justification for so doing. 
The only product of memory or reflection that can stir 
in him the emotion of patriotism is the statement that so 
far the tradition of the Empire has been to encourage 
and trust to political freedom. But political freedom, 
even in its noblest form, is a negative quality, and the 
word is apt to bear diff'erent meanings in Bengal and 
Rhodesia and Australia. 

States, however, constitute only one among many 
types of political entities. As soon as any body of men 
have been grouped under a common political name, that 
name may acquire emotional associations as well as 
an intellectually analysable meaning. For the conven- 
ience, for instance, of local government the suburbs 
of Birmingham are divided into separate boroughs. 
Partly because these boroughs occupy the site of ancient 
villages, partly because football teams of Scotch 
professionals are named after them, partly because 
human emotions must have something to attach them- 
selves to, they are said to be developing a fierce local 
patriotism, and West Bromwich is said to hate Aston as 
the Blues hated the Greens in the Byzantine theatre. 
In London, largely under the influence of the Birming- 
ham instance, twenty-nine new boroughs were created 
in 1899, with names — at least in the case of the City of 
Westminster — deliberately selected in order to revive 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 103 

. — - — — _ — \ 

half-forgotten emotional associations. However in 
spite of Mr. Chesterton's prophecy in "The Napoleon 
of Notting Hill," very few Londoners have learnt to 
think primarily as citizens of their boroughs. Town 
Halls are built which they never see, coats of arms are 
invented which they would not recognize; and their 
boroughs are mere electoral wards in which they vote 
for a list of unknown names grouped under the general 
title adopted by their political party. 

The party is, in fact, the most effective political entity 
in the modern national State. It has come into existence 
with the appearance of representative government on a 
large scale; its development has been unhampered by 
legal or constitutional traditions, and it represents the 
most vigorous attempt which has been made to adapt the 
form of our political institutions to the actual facts of 
human nature. In a modem State there may be ten 
million or more voters. Every one of them has equal 
right to come forward as a candidate and to urge either 
as candidate or agitator the particular views which he 
may hold on any possible political question. But to 
each citizen, living as he does in the infinite stream of 
things, only a few of his million fellow-citizens could 
exist as separate objects of political thought or feel- 
ing, even if each one of them held only one opinion on 
one subject without change during his life. Something 
is required simpler and more permanent, something 
which can be loved and trusted, and which can be recog- 
nized at successive elections as being the same thing that 



104 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

, -— * 

was loved and trusted before; and a party is such a 
thing. 

The origin of any particular party may be due to a 
deliberate intellectual process. It may be formed, as 
Burke said, by "a body of men united for promoting by 
their joint endeavours the national interest upon some 
particular principle in which they are all agreed."^ 

But when a party has once come into existence its 
fortunes depend upon facts of human nature of 
which deliberate thought is only one. It is primarily a 
name, which, like other names, calls up when it is heard 
or seen an "image" that shades imperceptibly into the 
voluntary realization of its meannig. As in other cases, 
emotional reactions can be set up by the name and its 
automatic mental associations. It is the business of 
the party managers to secure that these automatic 
associations shall be as clear as possible, shall be shared 
by as large a number as possible, and shall call up as 
many and as strong emotions as possible. For this 
purpose nothing is more generally useful than the party 
colour. Our distant ancestors must have been able to 
recognize colour before they recognized language, and 
the simple and stronger emotions more easily attach 
themselves to a colour than to a word. The poor boy 
who died the other day with the ribbon of the Sheffield 
Wednesday Football Club on his pillow loved the colour 
itself with a direct and intimate affection. 

A party tune is equally automatic in its action, and, 

^Thoughts on the Present Discontents (Macmillan, 1902), p. 81. 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 105 

in the case of people with a musical "ear," even more 
effective than a party colour as an object of emotion. 
As long as the Marseillaise, which is now the national 
tune of France, was the party tune of the revolution 
its influence was enormous. Even now, outside of 
France, it is a very valuable party asset. It was a wise 
suggestion which an experienced political organizer 
made in the Westminster Gazette at the time of Glad- 
stone's death, that part of the money collected in his 
honour should be spent in paying for the composition of 
the best possible marching tune, which should be 
identified for all time with the Liberal Party .^ One 
of the few mistakes made by the very able men who 
organised Mr. Chamberlain's Tariff" Reform Campaign 
was their failure to secure even a tolerably good tune. 
Only less automatic than those of colour or tune 
are the emotional associations called up by the first 
and simplest meaning of the word or words used for the 
party name. A Greek father called his baby "Very 
Glorious" or "Good in Council," and the makers of 
parties in the same way chose names whose primary 
meanings possess established emotional associations. 
From the beginning of the existence and activity of a 
party new associations are, however, being created 
which tend to take the place, in association, of the origi- 
nal meaning of the name. No one in America when he 
uses the terms Republican or Democrat thinks of their 
dictionary meaning. Any one, indeed, who did so 
1 WestminsteT Gazette, June 11, 1898. 



106 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

would have acquired a mental habit as useless and 
as annoying as the habit of reading Greek history 
with a perpetual recognition of the original meanings of 
names like Aristobulus and Theocritus. Long and 
precise names which make definite assertions as to party 
policy are therefore soon shortened into meaningless 
syllables with new associations derived from the actual 
history of the party. The Constitutional Democrats 
in Russia become Cadets, and the Independent Labour 
Party becomes the I.L.P. On the other hand, the less 
conscious emotional associations which are automati- 
cally excited by less precise political names may last 
much longer. The German National Liberals were valu- 
able allies for Bismarck during a whole generation be- 
cause their name vaguely suggested a combination of 
patriotism and freedom. When the mine-owners in the 
Transvaal decided some years ago to form a political 
party they chose, probably after considerable discussion, 
the name of "Progressive." It was an excellent choice. 
In South Africa the original associations of the word 
were apparently soon superseded, but elsewhere it long 
suggested that Sir Percy Fitzpatrick and his party had 
the same sort of democratic sympathies as Mr.M'Kinnon 
Wood and his followers on the London County Council. 
No one speaking to an audience whose critical and 
logical faculties were fully aroused would indeed 
contend that because a certain body of people had chosen 
to call themselves Progressives, therefore a vote against 
them was necessarily a vote against progress. But in 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 107 



the dim and shadowy region of emotional association 
a good name, if its associations are sufficiently sub- 
conscious, has a real political value. 

Conversely, the opponents of a party attempt to label 
it with a name that will excite feelings of opposition. 
The old party terms of Whig and Tory are striking 
instances of such names given by opponents and lasting 
perhaps half a century before they lost their original 
abusive associations. More modem attempts have been 
less successful, because they have been more precise. 
"Jingo" had some of the vague suggestiveness of an 
effectively bad name, but "Separatist," "Little England- 
er," "Food Taxer," remain as assertions to be conscious- 
ly accepted or rejected. 

The whole relation between party entities and political 
impulse can perhaps be best illustrated from the art of 
advertisement. In advertisement the intellectual 
process can be watched apart from its ethical 
implications, and advertisement and party politics are 
becoming more and more closely assimilated in method. 
The political poster is placed side by side with the trade 
or theatrical poster on the hoardings, it is drawn by the 
same artist, and follows the same empirical rules of 
art. Let us suppose, therefore, that a financier thinks 
that there is an opening for a large advertising campaign 
in connection, say, with the tea trade. The actual tea- 
leaves in the world are as varied and unstable as the 
actual political opinions of mankind. Every leaf in 
every tea-garden is different from every other leaf, and 



108 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

a week of damp weather may change the whole stock 
in any warehouse. What therefore should the adver- 
tiser do to create a commercial "entity," a "tea" which 
men can think and feel about? A hundred years ago he 
would have made a number of optimistic and detailed 
statements with regard to his opportunities and methods 
of trade. He would have printed in the newspapers a 
statement that "William Jones, assisted by a staff of 
experienced buyers, will attend the tea-sales of the East 
India Company, and will lay in parcels from the best 
Chinese Gardens, which he will retail to his customers 
at a profit of not more than five per centum." This, how- 
ever, is an open appeal to the critical intellect, and by 
the critical intellect it would now be judged. We should 
not consider Mr. Jones to be an unbiassed witness as to 
the excellence of his choice, or think that he would have 
sufficient motive to adhere to his pledge about his rate 
of profit if he thought he could get more. 

Nowadays, therfore, such an advertiser would prac- 
tise on our automatic and sub-conscious associations. 
He would choose some term, say "Parramatta Tea," 
which would produce in most men a vague suggestion 
of the tropical East, combined with the sub-conscious 
memory of a geography lesson on Australia. He would 
then proceed to create in connection with the word an 
automatic picture-image having previous emotional 
associations of its own. By the time that a hund- 
red thousand pounds had been cleverly spent, no one 
in England would be able to see the word "Parramatta" 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 109 



on a parcel without a vague impulse to buy, founded on 
a day-dream recollection of his grandmother, or of the 
British fleet, or of a pretty young English matron, or 
of any other subject that the advertiser had chosen for 
its associations with the emotions of trust or aff'ection. 
When music plays a larger part in English public 
education it may be possible to use it effectively for 
advertisement, and a "Parramatta Motif" would in that 
ease appear in all the pantomimes, in connection, say, 
with a song about the Soldier's Return, and would be 
squeaked by a gramophone in every grocer's shop. 

This instance has the immense advantage, as an aid 
to clearness of thought, that up to this point no Par- 
ramatta Tea exists, and no one has even settled what 
sort of tea shall be provided under that name. Par- 
ramatta tea is still a commercial entity pure and simple. 
It may later on be decided to sell very poor tea at a 
large profit until the original associations of the name 
have been gradually superseded by the association of 
disappointment. Or it may be decided to experiment 
by selling different teas under that name in different 
places, and to push the sale of the flavour which "takes 
on." But there are other attractive names of teas on the 
hoardings, with associations of babies, and bull-dogs, 
and the Tower of London. If it is desired to develop 
a permanent trade in competition with these it will prob- 
ably be found wisest to supply tea of a fairly uniform 
quality, and with a distinctive flavour which may act 
as its "meaning." The great difficulty will then come 



no HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

when there is a change of public taste, and when the 
sales fall off because the chosen flavour no longer 
pleases. The directors may think it safest to go on 
selling the old flavour to a diminishing number of cus- 
tomers, or they may gradually substitute another flavour, 
taking the risk that the number of housewives who 
say, "This is not the real Parramatta Tea," may be 
balanced by the number of those who say, "Parramatta 
Tea has improved." If people will not buy the old 
flavour at all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under 
a new name, the Parramatta Tea Company must be con- 
tent to disappear, like a religion which has made an 
unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles. 

All these conditions are as familiar to the party poli- 
tician as they are to the advertiser. The party candi- 
date is, at his first appearance, to most of his constitu- 
ents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or Con- 
servative upon it. That name has associations of colour 
and music, of traditional habit and aff'ection, which, 
when once formed, exist independently of the party 
policy. Unless he bears the party label — unless he is, 
as the Antericans say, a "regular" candidate — not only 
will those habits and aff'ections be cut off from him, but 
he will find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself 
as a tangible entity to the electors at all. A proportion 
of the electors, varying greatly at different times and 
at different places, will vote for the "regular" nominee 
of their party without reference to his program, 
though to the rest of them, and always to the nominal- 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 111 

ing committee, he must also present a program which 
can be identified with the party policy. But, in any 
case, as long as he is a party candidate, he must remem- 
ber that it is in that character that he speaks and acts. 
The party prepossessions and party expectations of his 
constituents alone make it possible for them to think 
and feel with him. When he speaks there is between 
him and his audience the party mask, larger and less 
mobile than his own face, like the mask which enabled 
actors to be seen and heard in the vast open-air theatres 
of Greece. If he can no longer act the part with 
sincerity he must either leave the stage or present him- 
self in the mask of another party. 

Party leaders, again, have always to remember that 
the organization which they control is an entity with 
an existence in the memory and emotions of the 
electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. 
This does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. 
As individuals they can indeed only preserve their 
political life by being in constant readiness to lose it. 
Somtimes they must even risk the existence of their 
party itself. When Sir Robert Peel was converted to 
Free Trade in 1845, he had to decide whether he and his 
friends should shatter the Tory Party by leaving it, or 
should so transform its policy that it might not be rec- 
ognized, even in the half conscious logic of habit and 
association, as that entity for which men had voted and 
worked four years before. In either case Peel was 
doing something other and more serious than the expres- 



112 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

, — -— • 

sion of his individual opinion on a question of the 
moment. And yet, if, recognizing this, he had gone 
on advocating com duties for the sake of his party, his 
whole personal force as a politician, and therefore even 
his party value, would have been lost. 

If a celestial intelligence were now to look down 
from heaven on to earth with the power of observing 
every fact about all human beings at once, he might 
ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, 
what that Socialism is which influences so many lives? 
He might answer himself with a definition which could 
be clumsily translated as "a movement towards greater 
social equality, depending for its force upon three main 
factors, the growing political power of the working 
classes, the growing social sympathy of many members 
of all classes, and the belief, based on the growing 
authority of scientific method, that social arrangements 
can be transformed by means of conscious and deliber- 
ate contrivance." He would see men trying to forward 
this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and 
regulative or collective administration; some of which 
proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to 
the facts of human existence, and some would in the end 
be abandoned, either because no nation could be per- 
suaded to try them, or because when tried they failed. 
But he would also see that this definition of a many- 
sided and ever-varying movement drawn by abstraction 
from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 113 

» < 

not a description of "Socialism" as it exists for the 
greater number of its supporters. The need of some- 
thing which one may love and for which one may work 
has created for thousands of working men a personified 
"Socialism," a winged goddess with stem eyes and 
drawn sword, to be the hope of the world and the pro- 
tector of those that suffer. The need of some engine of 
thought which one may use with absolute faith and cer- 
tainty has also created another Socialism, not a personifi- 
cation, but a final and authoritative creed. Such a 
creed appeared in England in 1884, and William Morris 
took it down in his beautiful handwriting from Mr. 
Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made 
a little dimly educated working man say to me three 
years later, with tears of genuine humility in his eyes, 
"How strange it is that this glorious truth has been hid- 
den from all the clever and learned men of the world 
and shown to me." 

Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol 
used in common speech and writing. A hundred years 
hence it may have gone the way of its predecessors — 
Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism — and 
may survive only in histories of a movement which has 
since undergone other transformation and borne other 
names. It may, on the other hand, remain, as 
Republic has remained in France, to be the title on 
coins and public buildings of a movement which, after 
many disappointments and disillusionments, has suc- 
ceeded in establishing itself as a government. 



114 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

» -♦ 

But the use of a word in common speech is only the 
resultant of its use by individual men and women, and 
particularly by those who accept it as a party name. 
Each one of them, as long as the movement is really 
alive, will find that while the word must be used, because 
otherwise the movement will have no political existence, 
yet its use creates a constant series of difficult problems in 
conduct. Any one who applies the name to himself 
or others in a sense so markedly different from common 
use as to make it certain or probable that he is creat- 
ing a false impression is rightly charged with want of 
ordinary veracity. And yet there are cases where enor- 
mous practical results may depend upon keeping wide 
the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 
"Modernist" Roman Catholic who has studied the history 
of religion uses the term "Catholic Church" to mean a 
society which has gone through various intellectual 
stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality 
upon the existence of reasonable freedom of change in 
the future. He therefore calls himself a Catholic. To 
the Pope and his advisers, on the other hand, the Church 
is an unchanging miracle based on an unchanging revela- 
tion. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he "believes" 
in the Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves 
in the actual occurrence of most of the facts which con- 
stitute the original revelation, seems to them to be simply 
a liar, who is stealing their name for his own fraudulent 
purposes. They can no more understand him than can 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 115 

the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Dem.ocrats 
understand Bernstein and his Modernist allies. Bern- 
stein himself, on the other hand, has to choose whether 
he ought to try to keep open the common use of the name 
Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon 
it, because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling 
and confusion of thought. 

Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and 
power of expression is, so to speak, a party — a political 
entity — in himself. He may fashion a permanent and 
recognizable mask for himself as "Honest John" or 
"The Grand Old Man." But this can as a rule only be 
done by those who learn the main condition of their 
task, the fact that if an individual statesman's intel- 
lectual career is to exist for the mass of the present 
public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate 
adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, 
slow, simple, and consistent. The indifferent and half- 
attentive mind which most men turn towards politics 
is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes 
to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the 
same attitude for a long time. A bird that flies across 
the plate leaves no mark. 

"Change of opinion," wrote Gladstone in 1868, "in 
those to whose judgment the public looks more or less 
to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a 
much smaller evil than their persistence in a course 
which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be 



116 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



blamed. But it is always to be watched with vigil- 
lance; always to be challenged and put upon its trial." ^ 
Most statesmen avoid this choice between the loss of 
force resulting from a public change of opinion, and 
the loss of character resulting from the public persist- 
ence in an opinion privately abandoned, not only by 
considering carefully every change in their own con- 
clusions, but by a delay, which often seems cowardly 
and absurd, in the public expression of their thoughts 
upon all questions except those which are ripe for im- 
mediate action. The written or reported word remains, 
and becomes part of that entity outside himself which 
the stateman is always building or destroying or trans- 
forming. 

The same conditions affect other political entities 
besides parties and statemen. If a newspaper is to 
live as a political force it must impress itself on men's 
minds as holding day by day to a consistent view. The 
writers, not only from editorial discipline, but from the 
instinctive desire to be understood, write in the character 
of their paper's personality. If it is sold to a proprietor 
holding or wishing to advocate different opinions, it must 
either frankly proclaim itself as a new thing or must 
make it appear by slow and solemn argumentative steps 
that the new attitude is a necessary development of 
the old. It is therefore rightly felt that a capitalist who 
buys a paper for the sake of using its old influence to 
strengthen a new movement is doing something to be 

1 Gleanings, vol. vii. p. 100, quoted in Morley's Life, vol. i. p. 211. 



POLITICAL ENTITIES 117 

■ 

judged by other moral standards than those which 
apply to the purchase of so much printing-machinery 
and paper. He may be destroying something which 
has been a stable and intelligible entity for thousands 
of plain people living in an otherwise unintelligible 
world, and which has collected round it affection and 
trust as real as was ever inspired by an orator or a 
monarch. 



CHAPTER III 

NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 
IN POLITICS 

The assumption — ^which is so closely interwoven with 
our habits of political and economic thought — that 
men always act on a reasoned opinion as to their 
interests, may be divided into two separate assumptions: 
first, that men always act on some kind of inference as 
to the best means of reaching a preconceived end, and 
secondly, that all inferences are of the same kind, and 
are produced by a uniform process of "reasoning." 

In the two preceding chapters I dealt with the first 
assumption, and attempted to show that it is important 
for a politician to realize that men do not always act 
on inferences as to means and ends. I argued that 
men often act in politics under the immediate stimulus 
of affection and instinct, and that affection and instinct 
may be directed towards political entities which are 
very different from those facts in the world around us 
which we can discover by deliberate observation and 
analysis. 

In this chapter I propose to consider the second 

assumption, and to inquire how far it is true that men, 

when they do form inferences as to the result of their 

political actions, always form them by a process of 

reasoning. 

118 



NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 119 

» » 

In such an inquiry one meets the preliminary dif- 
ficuhy that it is very hard to arrive at a clear defini- 
tion of reasoning. Any one who watches the working 
of his own mind will find that it is by no means easy 
to trace these sharp distinctions between various mental 
states, which seem so obvious when they are set out in 
little books on psychology. The mind of man is like 
a harp, all of whose strings throb together; so that 
emotion, impulse, inference, and the special kind of 
inference called reasoning, are often simultaneous and 
intermingled aspects of a single mental experience. 

This is especially true in moments of action and 
excitement; but when we are sitting in passive con- 
templation we would often find it hard to say whether 
our successive states of consciousness are best described 
as emotions or inferences. And when our thought 
clearly belongs to the type of inference it is often hard 
to say whether its steps are controlled by so definite a 
purpose of discovering truth that we are entitled to 
call it reasoning. 

Even when we think with effort and with a definite 
purpose, we do not always draw inferences or form 
beliefs of any kind. If we forget a name we say the 
alphabet over to ourselves, and pause at each letter to 
see if the name we want will be suggested to us. When 
we receive bad news we strive to realize it by allowing 
successive mental associations to arise of themselves, and 
waiting to discover what the news will mean for us. A 
poet broods with intense creative effort on the images 



120 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

which appear in his mind, and arranges them, not in 
order to discover truth, but in order to attain an artistic 
and dramatic end. In Prospero's great speech in "The 
Tempest" the connection between the successive images 
— the baseless fabric of this vision — the cloud-capped 
towers — the gorgeous palaces — the solemn temples — • 
the great globe itself — is, for instance, one not of infer- 
ence but of reverie, heightened by creative effort, and 
subordinated to poetic intention. 

Most of the actual inferences which we draw during 
any day belong, indeed, to a much humbler type of 
thought than do some of the higher forms of non- 
inferential association. Many of our inferences, like 
the quasi-instinctive impulses which they accompany 
and mjodify, take place when we are making no con- 
scious effort at all. In such a purely instinctive action 
as leaping backwards from a falling stone, the impulse 
to leap and the inference that there is danger, are 
simply two names for a single automatic and uncon- 
scious process. We can speak of instinctive inference 
as well as of instinctive impulse; we draw, for instance, 
by an instinctive mental process, inferences as to the 
distance and solidity of objects from the movements of 
our eye-muscles in focussing, and from the difference 
between the images on our two retinas. We are unaware 
of the method by which we arrive at these inferences, 
and even when we know that the double photograph 
in the stereoscope is flat, or that the conjurer has placed 
two converging sheets of looking-glass beneath his table, 



NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 121 

— — — — ^ — I 

we can only say that the • photograph "looks" solid, or 
that we "seem" to see right under the table. 

The whole process of inference, rational or non- 
rational, is indeed built up from the primary fact that 
one mental state may call up another, either because 
the two have been associated together in the history 
of the individual, or because a connection between the 
two has proved useful in the history of the race. If a 
mian and his dog stroll together down the street they 
turn to the right hand or the left, hesitate or hurry in 
crossing the road, recognize and act upon the bicycle 
bell and the cabman's shout, by using the same process 
of inference to guide the same group of impulses. 
Their inferences are for the most part effortless, though 
sometimes they will both be seen to pause until they 
have settled some point by wordless deliberation. It 
is only when a decision has to be taken affecting the 
more distant purposes of his life that the man enters 
on a region of definitely rational thought where the 
dog cannot follow him, in which he uses words, and is 
more or less conscious of his own logical methods. 

But the weakness of inference by automatic associa- 
tion as an instrument of thought consists in the fact 
that either of a pair of associated ideas may call up the 
other without reference to their logical connection. 
The effect calls up the cause as freely as the cause calls 
up the effect. A patient under a hypnotic trance is 
wonderfully rapid and fertile in drawing inferences, 
but he hunts the scent backward as easily as he does 



122 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



forward. Put a dagger in his hand and he believes 
that he has committed a murder. The sight of an 
empty plate convinces him that he has had dinner. If 
left to himself he will probably go through routine 
actions well enough. But any one who understands 
his condition can make him act absurdly. 

In the same way when we dream we draw absurd 
inferences by association. The feeling of discomfort 
due to slight indigestion produces a belief that we are 
about to speak to a large audience and have mislaid 
our notes, or are walking along the Brighton Parade in 
a night-shirt. Even when men are awake, those parts 
of their mind to which for the moment they are not 
giving full attention are apt to draw equally unfounded 
inferences. A conjurer who succeeds in keeping the 
attention of his audience concentrated on the observa- 
tion of what he is doing with his right hand can make 
them draw irrational conclusions from the movements 
of his left hand. People in a state of strong religious 
emotion sometimes become conscious of a throbbing 
sound in their ears, due to the increased force of their 
circulation. An organist, by opening the thirty^two 
foot pipe, can create the same sensation, and can thereby 
induce in the congregation a vague and half -conscious 
belief that they are experiencing religious emotion. 

The political importance of all this consists in the 
fact that most of the political opinions of most men are 
the result, not of reasoning tested by experience, but of 
unconscious or half -conscious inference fixed by habit. 



NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 123 

It is indeed mainly in the formation of tracks of thought 
that habit shows its power in politics. In our other 
activities habit is largely a matter of muscular adapta- 
tion, but the bodily movements of politics occur so sel- 
dom that nothing like a habit can be set up by them. 
One may see a respectable voter, whose political opinions 
have been smoothed and polished by the mental habits 
of thirty years, fumbling over the act of marking and 
folding his ballot paper like a child with its first copy- 
book. 

Some men even seem to reverence most those of their 
opinions whose origin has least to do with deliberate 
reasoning. When Mr. Barrie's Bowie Haggart said: 
"I am of opeenion that the works of Burns is of an 
immoral tendency. I have not read them myself, but 
such is my opeenion," ^ he was comparing the merely 
rational conclusion which might have resulted from a 
reading of Burns's works with the conviction about them 
which he found ready-made in his mind, and which 
was the more sacred to him and more intimately his 
own, because he did not know how it was produced. 

Opinion thus unconsciously formed is a fairly safe 
guide in the affairs of our daily life. The material 
world does not often go out of its way to deceive us, 
and our final convictions are the resultant of many 
hundreds of independent fleeting inferences, of which 
the valid are more numerous and more likely to survive 
than the fallacious. But even in our personal affairs 
1 Auld Licht Idylls, p. 220. 



124 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

our memory is apt to fade, and we can often remember 
the association between two ideas, while forgetting the 
cause which created that association. We discover in 
our mind a vague impression that Simpson is a drunk- 
ard, and cannot recollect whether we ever had any rea- 
son to believe it, or whether some one once told us that 
Simpson had a cousin who invented a cure for drunk- 
enness. When the connection is remembered in a tell- 
ing phrase, and when its origin has never been con- 
sciously noticed, we may find ourselves with a really 
vivid belief for which we could, if cross-examined, give 
no account whatever. When, for instance, we have 
heard an early- Victorian bishop called "Soapy Sam" 
half a dozen times we get a firm conviction of his 
character without further evidence. 

Under ordinary circumstances not much harm is 
done by this fact; because a name would not be likely 
to "catch on" unless a good many people really thought 
it appropriate, and unless it "caught on" we should not 
be likely to hear it more than once or twice. But in 
politics, as in the conjuring trade, it is often worth while 
for some people to take a great deal of trouble in order 
to produce such an effect without waiting for the idea to 
enforce itself by merely accidental repetition. I have 
already said that political parties try to give each other 
bad names by an organized system of mental suggestion. 
If the word "Wastrel," for instance, appears on the con- 
tents bills of the Daily Mail one morning as a name for 
the Progressives during a County Council election, a 



NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 125 

passenger riding on an omnibus from Putney to the 
Bank will see it half-consciously at least a hundred 
times, and will have formed a fairly stable mental 
association by the end of the journey. If he reflected, 
he would know that only one person has once decided 
to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect 
on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used 
it independently of each other. The contents-bills, 
indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short 
and pithy merely from consideration of space, have 
developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets 
(like the advertisement pages of an American magazine) 
into a psychological laboratory for the unconscious 
production of permanent associations. "Another Ger- 
man Insult," "Keir Hardie's Crime," "Balfour Backs 
Down," are intended to stick and do stick in the mind as 
ready-made opinions. 

In all this again the same rule holds as in the pro- 
duction of impulse. Things that are nearer sense, 
nearer to our more ancient evolutionary past, produce 
a readier inference as well as a more compelling impulse. 
When a new candidate on his first appearance smiles 
at his constituents exactly as if he were an old friend, 
not only does he appeal, as I said in an earlier chapter, 
to an ancient and immediate instinct of human aff'ection, 
but he produces at the same time a shadowy belief that 
he is an old friend; and his agent m;ay even imply this, 
provided that he says nothing definite enough to arouse 
critical and rational attention. By the end of the 



126 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



meeting one can safely go as far as to call for three cheers 
for "good old Jones."^ 

Mr. G. K. Chesterton some years ago quoted from a 
magazine article on American elections a sentence which 
said: "A little sound common-sense often goes further 
with an audience of American working men than much 
high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought 
forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won 
hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential 
election." ^ The "sound common-sense" consisted, not, 
as Mr. Chesterton pretended to believe, in the presen- 
tation of the hammering as a logical argument, but in 
the orator's knowledge of the way in which force is given 
to non-logical inference and his willingness to use that 
knowledge. 

When a vivid association has been once formed it 
sinks into the mass of our mental experience, and may 
then undergo developments and transformations with 
which deliberate ratiocination had very little to do. I 
have been told that when an English agitation against 
the importation of Chinese contract labour into South 
Africa was proposed, an important personage said that 

1 Three-quarters of the art of the trained salesman depends upon his 
empirical knowledge of this group of psychological facts. A small girl 
of my acquaintance, explaining why she had brought back from her first 
independent shopping expedition a photograph frame which she herself 
found to be distressing, said: "The shopman seemed to suppose I had 
chosen it, and so I paid for it and came away." But her explanation 
was the result of memory and reflection. At the moment, in a shadowy 
way which was sufficient for the shopnlan, she supposed that she had 
chosen it. 

^Heretics, p. 122. 



NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 127 



"there was lot a vote in it." But the agitation was set 
on foot, and was based on a rational argument that the 
conditions enacted by the Ordinance amounted to a 
rather cruel kind of slavery imposed upon unusually 
intelligent Asiatics. Any one, however, who saw much 
of politics in the winter of 1905-6 must have noticed 
that the pictures of Chinamen on the hoardings 
aroused among very many of the voters an immediate 
hatred of the Mongolian racial type. This hatred was 
transferred to the Conservative party, and towards the 
end of the general election of 1906 a picture of a China- 
man thrown suddenly on a lantern screen before a 
working-class audience would have aroused an instan- 
taneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour. 

After the election, however, the memory of the Chinese 
faces on the posters tended slowly to identify itself, 
in the minds of the Conservatives, with the Liberals who 
had used them. I had at the general election worked 
in a constituency in which many such posters were 
displayed by my side, and where we were beaten. A 
year later I stood for the London County Council in the 
same constituency. An hour before the close of the 
poll I saw, with the unnatural clearness of polling-day 
fatigue, a large white face at the window of the ward 
committee-room, while a hoarse voice roared: "Where's 
your bloody pigtail? We cut it off last time: and now 
we'll put it round your bloody neck and strangle you." 

In February 1907, during the County Council election, 
there appeared on the London hoardings thousands of 



128 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



posters which were intended to create a belief that the 
Progressive members on the Council made their personal 
livelihood by defrauding the rate-payers. If a state- 
ment had been published to that effect it would have been 
an appeal to the critical intellect, and could have been 
met by argument, or in the law courts. But the appeal 
was made to the process of sub-conscious inference. 
The poster consisted of a picture of a man supposed to 
represent the Progressive Party, pointing a foreshortened 
finger, and saying, with sufficient ambiguity to escape 
the law of libel: "It's your money we want." Its 
effectiveness depended on its exploitation of the fact 
that most men judge of the truth of a charge of fraud by 
a series of rapid and unconscious inferences from the 
appearance of the man accused. The person represented 
was, if judged by the shape of his hat, the fashion of 
his watch-chain and ring, the neglected condition of his 
teeth, and the redness of his nose, obviously a profes- 
sional sharper. He was, I believe, drawn by an 
American artist, and his face and clothes had a vaguely 
American appearance, which, in the region of sub- 
conscious association, further suggested to most 
onlookers the idea of Tammany Hall. This poster was 
brilliantly successful, but, now that the election is over, 
it, like the Chinese pictures, seems likely to continue a 
career of irrational transference. One notices that one 
Progressive evening paper uses a reduced copy of it 
whenever it wishes to imply that the Moderates are in- 



NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 129 



fluenced by improper pecuniary motives. I myself find 
that it tends to associate itself in my mind with the 
energetic politician who induced the railway companies 
and others to pay for it, and who, for all I know, may 
in his own personal appearance recall the best traditions 
of the English gentleman. 

Writers on the "psychology of the crowd" have pointed 
out the effect of excitement and numbers in substituting 
non-rational for rational inference. Any cause, how- 
ever, which prevents a man from giving full attention 
to his mental processes may produce the phenomena of 
non-rational inference in an extreme degree. I have 
often watched in some small sub-committee the method 
by which either of the two men with a real genius for 
committee work whom I know could control his 
colleagues. The process was most successful towards 
the end of an afternoon, when the members were tired, 
and somewhat dazed with the effort of following a rapid 
talker through a mass of unfamiliar detail. If at that 
point the operator slightly quickened the flow of his 
information, and slightly emphasized the assumption 
that he was being thoroughly understood, he could put 
some at least of his colleagues into a sort of walking 
trance, in which they would have cheerfully assented 
to the proposition that the best mieans of securing, e.g., 
the permanence of private schools was a large and 
immediate increase in the number of public schools. 

It is sometimes argued that such non-rational infer- 



130 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



ences are merely the loose fringe of our political 
thinking, and that responsible decisions in politics, 
whether they are right or wrong, are always the result 
of conscious ratiocination. American political writers, 
for instance, of the traditional intellectualist type are 
sometimes faced with the fact that the delegates to 
national party conventions, when they select candidates 
and adopt programs for Presidential elections, are 
not in a condition in which they are likely to examine 
the logical validity of their own mental processes. Such 
writers fall back on the reflection that the actual choice 
of President is decided not by excited conventions, but 
by voters coming straight from the untroubled sanctuary 
of the American home. 

President Garfield illustrated this point of view in an 
often-quoted passage of his speech to the Republican 
Convention of 1880: — 

"I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into 
spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest 
man. But I remember that it is not the billows, but 
the calm level of the sea from which all heights and 
depths are measured. . . . Not here, in this brilliant 
circle where fifteen thousand men and women are 
gathered, is the destiny of the Republic to be decreed for 
the next four years . . . but by four millions of 
Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with 
wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts 
inspired by love of home and country, with the history of 
the past, the hopes of the future, and knowledge of the 



NON-RATIONAL INFERENCE 131 

great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in 
days gone by. There God prepares the verdict that 
shall determine the wisdom of our work tonight." ^ 

But the divine oracle, whether in America or in 
England, turns out, too often, only to be a tired house- 
holder, reading the headlines and personal paragraphs 
of his party newspaper, and half-consciously forming 
mental habits of mean suspicion or national arrogance. 
Sometimes, indeed, during an election, one feels that it 
is, after all, in big meetings, where big thoughts can be 
given with all their emotioned force, that the deeper 
things of politics have the best chance of recognition. 

The voter as he reads his newspaper may adopt by 
suggestion, and make habitual by repetition, not only 
political opinions but whole trains of political argument; 
and he does not necessarily feel the need of comparing 
them with other trains of argument already in his mind. 
A lawyer or a doctor will on quite general principles 
argue for the most extreme trade-unionism in his own 
profession, while he thoroughly agrees with a denun- 
ciation of trade-unionism addressed to him as a railway 
shareholder or ratepayer. The same audience can 
sometimes be led by way of "parental rights" to cheer 
for denominational religious instruction, and by way 
of "religious freedom" to hoot it. The most skilled 
political observer that I know, speaking of an organised 
newspaper attack, said, "As far as I can make out every 
argument used in attack and in defense has its separate 

1 Life of J. A. Garfield, by R. H. Conwell, p. 328. 



132 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

and independent efifect. They hardly ever meet, even if 
they are brought to bear upon the same mind." From 
the purely tactical point of view there is therefore much 
to be said for Lord Lyndhurst's maxim, "Never defend 
yourself before a popular assemblage except with and 
by retorting the attack; the hearers, in the pleasure which 
the assault gives them, will forget the previous charge." ^ 

1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. i. p. 122. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MATERIAL OF POLITICAL 
REASONING 

But man is fortunately not wholly dependent in his 
political thinking upon those forms of inference by 
immediate association which come so easily to him, and 
which he shares with the higher brutes. The whole 
progress of human civilization beyond its earliest stages 
has been made possible by the invention of methods of 
thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the 
working of nature more successfully than we could if we 
merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of 
our minds. 

These methods, however, when applied in politics, 
still represent a difficult and uncertain art rather than 
a science producing its effects with mechanical accuracy. 

When the great thinkers of Greece laid down rules for 
valid reasoning, they had, it is true, the needs of politics 
specially in their minds. After the prisoners in Plato's 
cave of illusion should be unbound by true philosophy 
it was to the service of the State that they were to devote 
themselves, and their first triumph was to be the control 
of passion by reason in the sphere of government. Yet 
if Plato could visit us now, he would learn that while 
our glass-makers proceed by rigorous and confident 
processes to exact results, our statesmen, like the glass- 

133 



134 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

makers of ancient Athens, still trust to empirical 
maxims and personal skill. Why is it, he would ask us, 
that valid reasoning has proved to be so much more 
difficult in politics than in the physical sciences? 

Our first answer might be found in the character of 
the material with which political reasoning has to deal. 
The universe which presents itself to our reason is the 
same as that which presents itself to our feelings and 
impulses — an unending stream of sensations and 
memories, every one of which is different from every 
other, and before which, unless we can select and rec- 
ognize and simplify, we must stand helpless and unable 
either to act or think. Man has therefore to create 
entities that shall be the material of his reasoning, 
just as he creates entities to be the object of his emotions 
and the stimulus of his instinctive inferences. 

Exact reasoning requires exact comparison, and in 
the desert or the forest there were few things which 
our ancestors could compare exactly. The heavenly 
bodies seem, indeed, to have been the first objects of 
consciously exact reasoning, because they were so 
distant that nothing could^ be known of them except 
position and movement, and their position and move- 
ment could be exactly compared from night to night. 

In the same way the foundation of the terrestrial 
sciences came from two discoveries, first, that it was 
possible to abstract single qualities, such as position 
and movement, in all things however unlike, from 
the other qualities of those things and to ^compare 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 135 

them exactly; and secondly, that it was possible 
artificially to create actual uniformities for the purpose 
of comparison, to make, that is to say, out of unlike 
things, things so like that valid inferences could 'be 
drawn as to their behaviour under like circumstances. 
Geometry, for instance, came into the service of man 
when it was consciously realized that all units of land 
and water were exactly alike in so far as they were 
extended surfaces. Metallurgy, on the other hand, 
only became a science when men could actually take 
two pieces of copper ore, unlike in shape and appear- 
ance and chemical constitution, and extract from them 
two pieces of copper so nearly alike that they would 
give the same results when treated in the same way. 

This second power over his material the student of 
politics can never possess. He can never create an 
artificial uniformity in man. He cannot, after twenty 
generations of education or breeding render even two 
human beings sufficiently like each other for him to 
prophesy with any approach to certainty that they will 
behave alike under like circumstances. 

How far has he the first power? How far can he 
abstract from the facts of man's state qualities in respect 
of which men are sufficiently comparable to allow of 
valid political reasoning? 

On April 5th, 1788, a year before the taking of the 
Bastille, John Adams, then American Ambassador to 
England, and afterwards President of the United States, 
wrote to a friend describing the "fermentation upon the 



136 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

subject of government" throughout Europe. "Is Gov- 
ernment a science or not?" he describes men as asking. 
"Are there any principles on which it is founded? 
What are its ends? If indeed there is no rule, no 
standard, all must be accident and chance. If there is 
a standard, what is it?" ^ 

Again and again in the history of political thought 
men have believed themselves to have found this 
"standard," this fact about man which should bear 
the same relation to politics which the fact that all 
things can be weighed bears to physics, and Ihe fact 
that all things can be measured bears to geometry. 

Some of the greatest thinkers of the past have looked 
for it in the final causes of man's existence. Every 
man differed, it is true, from every other /man, but 
these differences all seemed related to a type of perfect 
manhood which, though few men approached, and 
none attained it, all were capable of conceiving. May 
not, asked Plato, this type be the pattern — the "idea" — 
of man formed by God and laid up "in a heavenly 
place"? If so, men would have attained to a valid 
science of politics when by careful reasoning and deep 
contemplation they had come to know that pattern. 
Henceforward all the fleeting and varying things of 
sense would be seen in their due relation to the eternal 
and immutable purposes of God. 

Or thd relation of man to God's purpose was thought 
of not as that between the pattern and the copy, but 
1 Memoir of T. Brand Mollis, by J. Disney, p. 32. 



MATERIAL OF REASONING - 137 

as that between the mind of a legislator as expressed 
in enacted law, and the individual instance to which 
the law is applied. We can, thought Locke, by reflect- 
ing on the moral facts of the world, learn God's law. 
That law confers on us certain rights which we can 
plead in the Court of God, and from which a valid 
political science can be deduced. We know our rights 
with the same certainty that we know his law. 

"Men," wrote Locke, "being all the workmanship of 
one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the 
servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world 
by his order and about his business; they are his 
property whose workmanship they are, made to last 
during his, not one another's, pleasure: and being 
furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one com- 
munity of nature, there cannot be supposed any such 
subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy 
another as if we were made for one another's uses as 
the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours." ^ 

When the leaders of the American revolution sought 
for certainty in their argument against George the Third 
they too found it in the fact that men "are endowed by 
their Creator with certain unalienable rights." 

Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights 
on a presumed social contract. Human rights stood 
upon that contract as the elephant in the Indian parable 
stood upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like 
the tortoise, was apt to stand upon nothing at all. 

1 Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1690, ed. 1821, p. 191. 



138 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of hu- 
mour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of 
a science of politics deduced from natural right. 
"What sort of thing," he asked, "is a natural right, 
and where does the maker live, particularly in Atheist's 
Town, where they are most rife?" ^ 

Bentham himself believed that he had found the 
standard in the fact that all men seek pleasure and 
avoid pain. In that respect men were measurable 
and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could 
therefore be made experimental sciences in exactly 
the same sense as physics or chemistry. "The present 
work," wrote Bentham, "as well as any other work of 
mine that has been or will be published on the subject 
of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is 
an attempt to extend the experimental method of reason- 
ing fromj the physical branch to the moral." ^ 

Bentham's standard of "pleasure and pain" consti- 
tuted in many ways an important advance upon "natural 
right." It was in the first place founded upon a univer- 
sally accepted fact ; all men obviously do feel both pleas- 
ure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measur- 
able. One could, for instance, count the number of 
persons who suffered this year from an Indian famine, 
and compare it with the number of those who suffered 
last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleas- 

1 Escheat vice Taxation., Bentham's Works, vol. ii. p. 598. 

2 MS, in University College, London, quoted by Halevy, La Jeiinesse de 
Bentham, pp. 289-290. 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 139 

■ » 

ures were more intense than others, and that therefore 
the same man could in a given number of seconds experi- 
ence varying amounts of pleasure or pain. Above all, 
the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to 
the political thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes 
Bentham as saying of all philosophies which competed 
witli his Utilitarianism: "They consist, all of them, in 
so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of 
appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing 
upon the reader to accept the author's sentiment or 
opinion as a reason for itself." ^ 

A "Benthamite," therefore, whether he was a member 
of Parliament like Grote or Molesworth, or an official 
like Chadwick, or an organizing politician like Francis 
Place, could always check his own feeling about "rights 
of property," "mischievous agitators," "spirit of the Con- 
stitution," "insults to the flag," and so on, by examining 
statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the 
income, the hours of work, and the death rate from 
disease, of the various classes and races who inhabited 
the British Empire. 

But as a complete science of politics Benthamism 
is no longer possible. Pleasure and pain are indeed 
facts about human nature, but they are not the only 
facts which are important to the politician. The 
Benthamites, by straining the meaning of words, tried 
to classify such motives as instinctive impulse, ancient 

1 Bentham's JForks, vol i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's England and the 
English (1833), p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, cf. preface. 



140 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

tradition, habit, or personal and racial idiosyncrasy as 
being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; 
and the search for a basis of valid political reasoning 
has to begin again, among a generation more conscious 
than were Bentham and his disciples of the complexity 
of the problem, and less confident of absolute success. 

In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. 
We must aim at finding as many relevant and measur- 
able facts about human nature as possible, and we 
mus-t attempt to make all of them serviceable in political 
reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material 
for a political science, we must adopt the method of the 
biologist, who tries to discover how many common 
qualities can be observed and measured in a group of 
related beings, rather than that of the physicist, who 
constructs, or used to construct, a science out of a single 
quality common to the whole material world. 

The facts when collected tqiust, because they are 
many, be arranged. I believe that it would be found 
convenient by the political student to arrange them 
under three main heads: descriptive facts as to the 
human type; quantitative facts as to inherited varia- 
tions from that type observed either in individuals 
or groups of individuals; and facts, both quantitative 
and descriptive, as to the environment into which men 
are born, and the observed effect of that environment 
upon their political actions and impulses. 

A medical student already attempts to master as 
many as possible of those facts about the human type 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 141 

that are relevant to his science. The descriptive facts, 
for instance, of typical human anatomy alone which he 
has to learn before he can hope to pass his examina- 
tions must number many thousands. If he is to remem- 
ber them so that he can use them in practice, they must 
be carefully arranged in associated groups. He may 
find, for instance, that he remembers the anatomical 
facts about the human eye most easily and correctly 
by associating them with their evolutionary history, 
or the facts about the bones of the hand by associating 
them with the visual image of a hand in an X-ray 
photograph. 

The quantitative facts as to variations from the 
anatomical human type are collected for him in statis- 
tical form, and he makes an attempt to acquire the main 
facts as to hygienic environment when and if he takes 
the Diploma of Public Health. 

The student teacher, too, during his period of train- 
ing acquires a series of facts about the human type, 
though in his case they are as yet far less numerous, 
less accurate, and less conveniently arranged than those 
in the medical text-books. 

If the student of politics followed such an arrange- 
ment, he would at least begin his course by mastering 
a treatise on psychology, containing all those facts 
about the human type which have been shown by experi- 
ence to be helpful in politics, and so arranged that the 
student's knowledge could be most easily recalled when 
wanted. 



142 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

At present, however, the politician who is trained for 
his work by reading the best-known treatises on political 
theory is still in the condition of the medical student 
trained by the study of Hippocrates or Galen. He is 
taught a few isolated, and therefore distorted, facts about 
the human type, about pleasure and pain, perhaps, and 
the association of ideas, or the influence of habit. He is 
told that these are selected from the other facts of human 
nature in order that he may think clearly on the 
hypothesis of there being no others. What the others 
may be he is left to discover for himself; but he is 
likely to assume that they cannot be the subject of 
effective scientific thought. He learns also a few em- 
pirical maxims about liberty and caution and the like, 
and, after he has read a little of the history of institu- 
tions, his political education is complete. It is no won- 
der that the average layman prefers old politicians, who 
have forgotten their book-learning, and young doctors 
who remember theirs.^ 

A political thinker so trained is necessarily apt to 
preserve the conception of human nature which he 
learnt in his student days in a separate and sacred com- 

1 In the winter of 1907-8 I happened, on different occasions, to discuss 
the method of approaching political science with two young Oxford stu- 
dents. In each case I suggested that it would be well to read a little 
psychology. Each afterwards told me that he had consulted his tutor, 
and had been told that psychology was "useless" or "nonsense." One 
tutor, a man of real intellectual distinction, w^as said to have added the 
curiously scholastic reason that psychology was "neither science nor 
philosophy." 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 143 

partment of his mind, into which the facts of experience, 
however laboriously and carefully gathered, are not 
permitted to enter. Professor Ostrogorski published, 
for instance, in 1902, an important and extraordinarily 
interesting book on "'Democracy and the Organization of 
Political Parties," containing the results of fifteen years 
close observation of the party system in America and 
England. The instances given in the book might have 
been used as the basis of a fairly full account of those 
facts in the human type which are of importance to the 
politician — the nature of our impulses, the necessary 
limitations of our contact with the external world, and 
the methods of that thinking brain which was evolved 
in our distant past, and which we have now to put to 
such new and strange uses. But no indication was given 
that Professor Ostrogorski's experience had altered in the 
least degree the conception of human nature with which 
he started. The facts observed are throughout regret- 
fully contrasted with "free reason," ' "the general idea 
of liberty," " "the sentiments which inspired the men of 
1848," ^ and the book ends with a sketch of a proposed 
constitution in which the voters are to be required to vote 
for candidates known to them through declarations of 
policy "from which all mention of party is rigorously 
excluded." * One seems to be reading a series of con- 
scientious observations of the Copemican heavens by a 
loyal but saddened believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy. 

^Passim, e.g., vol. ii. p. 728. -Ibid., p. 649. 

3 Ibid, p. 442. * Ibid, p. 756. 



144 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

Professor Ostrogorski was a distinguished member of 
the Constitutional Democratic Party in the first Dun^a 
of Nicholas II, and must have learnt for himself th^t 
if he and his fellows were to get force enough behind 
them to contend on equal terms with the Russian autoc- 
racy they must be a party, trusted and obeyed as a 
party, and not a casual collection of free individuals. 
Some day the history of the first Duma will be written, 
and we shall then know whether Professor Ostrogorski's 
experience and his faith were at last fused together in 
the heat of that great struggle. 

The English translation of Professor Ostrogorski's 
book is prefaced by an introduction from Mr. James 
Bryce. This introduction shows that even in the mind 
of the author of "The American Constitution" the con- 
ception of human nature which he learnt at Oxford still 
dwells apart. 

"In the ideal democracy," says Mr. Bryce, "every 
citizen is intelligent, patriotic, disinterested. His sole 
wish is to discover the right side in each contested 
issue, and to fix upon the best man among competing 
candidates. His common sense, aided by a knowledge 
of the constitution of his country, enables him to judge 
wisely between the arguments submitted to him, while 
his own zeal is sufficient to carry him to the polling 
booth." ' 

A few lines further on Mr. Bryce refers to "the 

1 Ostrogorski, vol. i. p. xliv. 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 145 

democratic ideal of the intelligent independence of the 
individual voter, an ideal far removed from the actuali- 
ties of any State." 

What does Mr. Bryce mean by "ideal democracy"? 
If it means anything it means the best form of 
democracy which is consistent with the facts of human 
nature. But one feels, on reading the whole passage, 
that Mr. Bryce means by those words the kind of 
democracy which might be possible if human nature 
were as he himself would like it to be, and as he was 
taught at Oxford to think that it was. If so, the pas- 
sage is a good instance of the effect of our traditional 
course of study in politics. No doctor would now begin 
a medical treatise by saying, "the ideal man requires 
no food, and is impervious to the action of bacteria, but 
this ideal is far removed from the actualities of any 
known population." No modern treatise on pedagogy 
begins with the statement that "the ideal boy knows 
things without being taught them, and his sole wish is 
the advancement of science, but no boys at all like this 
have ever existed." 

And what, in a world where causes have effects and 
effects causes, does "intelligent independence" mean? 

Mr. Herman Merivale, successively Professor of 
Political Economy at Oxford, imder-Secretary for the 
Colonies, and under-secretary for India, wrote in 

1861: 

"To retain or to abandon a dominion is not an issue 
which will ever be determined on the mere balance of 



146 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ 

profit and loss; or on the more refined but even less 
powerful motives supplied by abstract political philoso- 
phy. The sense of national honour ; the pride of blood, 
the tenacious spirit of self-defence, the sympathies of 
kindred communities, the instincts of a dominant race, 
the vague but generous desire to spread our civilization 
and our religion over the world; these are impulses 
which the student in his closet may disregard, but the 
statesman dares not. . . ." ^ 

What does "abstract political philosophy" here mean? 
No medical writer would speak of an "abstract" 
anatomical science in which men have no livers, nor 
would he add that though the student in his closet may 
disregard the existence of the liver the working physician 
dares not. 

Apparently Merivale means the same thing by 
"abstract" political philosophy that Mr. Bryce means 
by "ideal" democracy. Both refer to a conception of 
human nature constructed in all good faith by certain 
eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer 
exactly believed in, but which, because nothing else has 
taken its place, still exercises a kind of shadowy author- 
ity in a hypothetical universe. 

The fact that this or that writer speaks of a conception 
of human nature in which he is ceasing to believe as 
"abstract" or "ideal" may seem to be of merely aca- 

1 Herman Merivale, Colonization, 1861, 2nd edition. The Book is a re- 
issue, largely re-written, of lectures given at Oxford in 1837. The pas- 
sage quoted forms part of the 1861 additions, p. 675. 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 147 

demic interest. But such half -beliefs produce immense 
practical effects. Because Merivale saw that the politi- 
cal philosophy which his teachers studied in their closets 
was inadequate, and because he had nothing to sub- 
stitute for it, he frankly abandoned any attempt at valid 
thought on so difficult a question as the relation of the 
white colonies to the rest of the British Empire. He 
therefore decided in effect that it ought to be settled by 
the rule-of -thumb method of "cutting the painter"; and, 
since he was the chief official in the Colonial Office at a 
critical time, his decision, whether it was right or wrong, 
was not unimportant. 

Mr. Bryco has been perhaps prevented by the presence 
in his mind of such a half -belief from making that con- 
structive contribution to general political science for 
which he is better equipped than any other man of his 
time. "I am myself," he says in the same Introduction, 
"an optimist, almost a professional optimist, as indeed 
politics would be intolerable were not a man grimly 
resolved to see between the clouds all the blue sky he 
can." ^ Imagine an acknowledged leader in chemical 
research, who, finding that experiment did not bear out 
some traditional formula, should speak of himself as 
nevertheless "grimly resolved" to see things from the 
old and comfortable point of view! 

The next step in the course of political training which 
I am advocating would be the quantitative study of the 
inherited variations of individual men when compared 

^ Loc. cit., p. xliii. 



148 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

with the "normal" or "average" man who has so far 
served for the study of the type. 

How is the student to approach this part of the course? 
Every man differs quantitatively from every other man 
in respect of every one of his qualities. The student 
obviously cannot carry in his mind or use for the pur- 
poses of thought all the variations even of a single 
inherited quality which are to be found among the fif- 
teen hundred millions or so of human beings who at 
any one moment are in existence. Much less can he 
ascertain or remember the inter-relation > of thousands 
of inherited qualities in the past history of a race in 
which individuals are at every moment dying and being 
born. 

Mr. H. G. Wells faces this fact in that extremely 
stimulating essay on "Scepticism of the Instrument," 
which he has appended to his "Modern Utopia." His 
answer is that the difficulty is "of the very smallest 
importance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed 
in relation to anything but philosophy and wide gen- 
eralizations. But in philosophy it matters profoundly. 
If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two 
unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the 
chances are they serve my rude physiological pur- 
pose." ^ 

To the politician, however, the uniqueness of the 
individual is of enormous importance, not only when 
he is dealing with "philosophy and wide generaliza- 
1 A Modern Utopia, p. 381. 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 149 

_ » 

tions'' but in the practical affairs of his daily activity. 
Even the fowl-breeder does not simply ask for "two 
eggs" to put under a hen when he is trying to establish a 
new variety, and tiie politician, who is responsible for 
actual results in an amazingly complicated world, has to 
deal with more delicate distinctions than the breeder. A 
statesman who wants two private secretaries, or two gen- 
erals, or two candidates likely to receive equally en- 
thusiastic support from nonconformists and trade-union- 
ists, does not ask for "two men." 

On this point, however, most writers on political 
science seem to suggest that after they have described 
human nature as if all men were in all respects equal 
to the average man, and have warned their readers of 
the inexactness of their description, they can do no more. 
All knowledge of individual variations must be left to 
individual experience. 

John Stuart Mill, for instance, in the section on the 
Logic of the Moral Sciences at the end of his "System of 
Logic," implies this, and seems also to imply that any 
resulting in exactness in the political judgments and 
forecasts made by students and professors of politics 
does not involve a large element of error. 

"Excepting," he says, "the degree of uncertainty, 
which still exists as to the extent of the natural differ- 
ences of individual minds, and the physical circum- 
stances on which these may be dependent, (considera- 
tions which are of secondary importance when we are 
considering mankind in the average or en masse), I 



150 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

> 

believe most competent judges will agree that the gen- 
eral laws of the different constituent elements of human 
nature are even now sufficiently understood to render 
it possible for a competent thinker to deduce from those 
laws, with a considerable approach to certainty, the par- 
ticular type of character which would be formed, in 
mankind generally, by any assumed set of circum- 
stances." ^ 

Few people nowadays would be found to share Mill's 
belief. It is just because we feel ourselves unable to 
deduce with any "approach to certainty" the effect of 
circumstances upon character, that we all desire to 
obtain, if it is possible, a more exact idea of human 
variation than can be arrived at by thinking of mankind 
"in the average or en masse/' 

Fortunately the mathematical students of biology, 
of whom Professor Karl Pearson is the most distin- 
guished leader, are already showing us that facts of 
inherited variation can be so arranged that we can re- 
member them without having to get by heart millions 
of isolated instances. Professor Pearson and the other 
writers in the periodical Biometrika have measured 
innumerable beech leaves, snails' tongues, human skulls, 
etc., etc., and have recorded in each case the variations 
of any quality in a related group of individuals by that 
which Professor Pearson calls an "observation frequency 
polygon," but which I, in my own thinking, find that I 
call (from a vague memory of its shape) a "cocked hat." 

1 System of Logic, Book vi. vol. ii. (1875) , p. 462. 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 



151 



Here is a tracing of such a figure, founded on the 
actual measurement of 25,878 recruits for the United 
States army. 




'^^ 2-4 73 72 71 70 69 68/67 63 6^ U 63 £2 fil 

Jnches 

The line ABC records, by its distance at successive 
points from the line AC, the number of recruits reach- 
ing successive inches of height. It shows, e.g. (as 
indicated by the dotted lines) that the number of 
recruits betv/een 5 ft. 11. in. and 6 ft. was about 1500, 
and the number of those between 5 ft. 7 in. and 5 ft. 
8 in. about 4000. ' 

Such figures, when they simply record the results of 
the fact that the likeness of the offspring to the parent 
in evolution is constantly inexact, are (like the records 

^ This figure is adapted (by the kind permission of the publishers) 
from one given in Professor K. Pearson's Chances of Death, vol. i. p. 277. 
For the relation between such records of actual observation and the curves 
resulting from mathematical calculation of the known causes of variations, 
see ibid., chap, viii., the paper by the same author on "Contributions 
to the Mathematical Theory of Evolution," in vol. 186 (a) of the 
Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions (1896), and the chapters 
on evolution in his Grammar of Science, 2nd edition. 



152 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

• 

of other cases of "chance" variation) fairly symmetri- 
cal, the greatest number of instances being f omid at the 
mean, and the descending curves of those above and 
those below the mean corresponding pretty closely with 
each other. Boot manufacturers, as the result of experi- 
ence, construct in effect such a curve, making a large 
number of boots of the sizes. which in length or breadth 
are near the mean, and a symmetrically diminishing 
number of the sizes above and below it. 

In the next chapter I shall deal with the use in 
reasoning of such curves, either actually "plotted" or 
roughly imagined. In this chapter I point put, firstly, 
that they can be easily remembered (partly because 
our visual memory ^s extremely retentive of the image 
made by a black line on a white surface) and that we 
can in consequence carry in our minds the quantitative 
facts as to a number of variations enormously beyond 
the possibility of memory if they were treated as 
isolated instances ; and secondly, that we can by imagin- 
ing such curves form a roughly accurate idea of the 
character of the variations to be expected as to any 
inherited quality among groups of individuals not yet 
bom or not yet measured. 

The third and last division under which knowledge 
of man can be arranged for the purposes of political 
study consists of the facts of man's environment, and 
of the effect of environment upon his character and 
actions. The extreme instability and uncertainty of 
this element constitutes a special difficulty of poli- 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 153 

tics. The human type and the quantitative distri- 
bution of its variations are for the politician, who 
deals with a few generations only, practically perman- 
ent. Man's environment changes with ever-increasing 
rapidity. The inherited nature of every human being 
varies indeed from that of every other, but the relative 
frequency of the most important variations can be fore- 
casted for each generation. The difference, on the other 
hand, between one man's environment and that of other 
men can be arranged on no curve and remembered or 
forecasted by no expedient. Buckle, it is true, attempted 
to explain the present and prophesy the future intellec- 
tual history of modern nations by the help of a few 
generalizations as to the effect of that small fraction 
of their environment which consisted of climate. But 
Buckle failed, and no one has attacked the problem again 
with anything like his confidence. 

We can, of course, see that in the environment of 
any nation or class at any given time there are some 
facts which constitute for all its members a common 
experience, and therefore a common influence. Climate 
is such a fact, or the discovery of America, or the 
invention of printing, or the rates of wages and prices. 
All nonconformists are influenced by their memory of 
certain facts of which very few churchmen are aware, 
and all Irishmen by facts which most Englishmen try 
to forget. The student of politics must therefore read 
history, and particularly the history of those events 
and habits of thought in the immediate past which are 



154 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

likely to influence the generation in which he will 
work. But he must constantly be on his guard against 
the expectation that his reading will give him much 
power of accurate forecast. Where history shows him 
that such and such an experiment has succeeded or 
failed he must always attempt to ascertain how far 
success or failure was due to facts of the human type, 
which he may assume to have persisted into his own 
time, and how far to facts of environment. When he 
can show that failure was due to the ignoring of some 
fact of the type, and can state definitely what that fact 
is, he will be able to attach a real meaning to the 
repeated and unheeded maxims by which the elder 
members of any generation warn the younger that their 
ideas are "against human nature." But if it is possible 
that the cause was one of mental environment, that is 
to say, , of habit or tradition or memory, he should be 
constantly on his guard against generalizations about 
national or racial "character." 

One of the most fertile sources of error in modern 
political thinking consists, indeed, in the ascription to 
collective habit of that comparative permanence which , 
only belongs to biological inheritance. A whole science 
can be based upon easy generalizations about Celts and 
Teutons, or about East and West, and the facts from 
which the generalizations are drawn may all disappear 
in a generation. National habits used to change 
slowly in the past, because new methods of life were 
seldom invented .and only gradually introduced, and 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 155 

« 

because the means of communicating ideas between 

man and man or nation and nation were extremely 

imperfect; so that a true statement about a national 

habit might, and probably would, remain true for 

centuries. But now an invention which may produce 

profound changes in social or industrial life is as likely 

to be taken up with enthusiasm in some country on the 

other side of the globe as in the place of its origin. A 

statesman who has anything important to say says it 

to an audience of live hundred millions next morning, 

and great events like the Battle of the Sea of Japan 

begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off 

within a few hours of their happening. Enough has 

already occurred under these new conditions to show 

that the unchanging East may tomorrow enter upon 

a period of revolution, and that English indifference to 

ideas or French military ambition are habits which, 

under a sufficiently extended stimulus, nations can 

shake off as completely as can individual men. 



CHAPTER V 

THE METHOD OF POLITICAL 
REASONING 

The traditional method of political reasoning has 
inevitably shared the defects of its subject-matter. In 
thinking about politics we seldom penetrate behind those 
simple entities which form themselves so easily in our 
minds, or approach in earnest the infinite complexity 
of the actual world. Political abstractions, such as 
Justice, or Liberty, or the State, stand in our minds as 
things having a real existence. The names of political 
species, "governments" or "rights," or "Irishmen," sug- 
gest to us the idea of single "type specimens"; and we 
tend, like mediaeval naturalists, to assume that all the 
individual members of a species are in all respects 
identical with the type specimen and with each other. 

In politics a true proposition in the form of "All A 
is B" almost invariably means that a number of in- 
dividual persons or things possess the quality B in 
degrees of variation as numerous as are the individuals 
themselves. We tend, however, under the influence of 
our words and the mental habits associated with them 
to think of A either as a single individual possessing 

the qualitiy B, or as a number of individuals equally 

156 



METHOD OF REASONING 157 

i — J 

possessing that quality. As we read in the newspaper 
that "the educated Bengalis are disaffected" we either 
see, in the half -conscious substratum of visual images 
which accompanies our reading, a single Babu with a 
disaffected expression or the vague suggestion of a long 
row of identical Babus all equally disaffected. 

These personifications and uniformities, in their 
turn, tempt us to employ in our political thinking that 
method of a priori deduction from large and untried 
generalizations against which natural science from the 
days of Bacon has always protested. No scientist now 
argues that the planets move in circles, because planets 
are perfect, and the circle is a perfect figure, or that 
any newly discovered plant must be a cure for some 
disease because nature has given healing properties to 
all plants. But "logical" democrats still argue in Amer- 
ica that, because all men are equal, political offices 
ought to go by rotation, and "logical" coUectivists some- 
times argue from the "principle" that the State should 
own all the means of production to the conclusion that 
all railway managers should be elected by universal 
suffrage. 

In natural science, again, the conception of the plu- 
rality and interaction of causes has become part of our 
habitual mental furniture ; but in politics both the book- 
learned student and the man in the street may be heard 
to talk as if each result had only one cause. If the 
question, for instance, of the Anglo-Japanese alliance 
is raised, any two politicians, whether they are tramps 



158 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

, ' ' — — « 

on the outskirts of a Hyde Park crowd or Heads of 
Colleges writing to the Times, are not unlikely to argue, 
one, that all nations are suspicious, and that therefore 
the alliance must certainly fail, and the other that all 
nations are guided by their interest, and that therefore 
the alliance must certainly succeed. The landlord of 
the "Rainbow" in "Silas Marner" had listened to many 
thousands of political discussions before he adopted his 
formula, "The truth lies atween you: you're both right 
and both wrong, as I allays say." 

In Economics the danger of treating abstract and 
uniform words as if they were equivalent to abstract 
and uniform things has now been recognized for the 
last half century. When this recognition began, it was 
objected by the followers of the "classical" Political 
Economy that abstraction was a necessary condition 
of thought, and that all dangers arising from it would 
be avoided if we saw clearly what it was that we were 
doing. Bagehot, who stood at the meeting-point of the 
old Economics and the new, wrote about 1876: — 

"Political Economy. . .is an abstract science, just as 
statics and dynamics are deductive sciences. And in 
consequence, it deals with an unreal and imaginary 
subject,. . .not with the entire real man as we know 
him in fact, but with a simpler imaginary man. . . . " ^ 

He goes on to urge that the real and complex man can 
be depicted by printing on our minds a succession of 
different imaginary simple men. "The maxim of 

^ Economic Studies (Longmans, 1895) , p. 97. 



M ETHODOFREASONING 159 

science," he says, "is that of common-sense — simple 
cases first; begin with seeing how the main force acts 
when there is as little as possible to impede it, and 
when you thoroughly comprehend tliat, add to it in suc- 
cession the separate effects of each of the encumbering 
and interfering agencies." ^ 

But this process of mental chromolithography, though 
it is sometimes a good way of learning a science, is not 
a way of using it; and Bagehot gives no indication 
how his complex picture of man, formed from successive 
layers of abstraction, is to be actually employed in fore- 
casting economic results. 

When Jevons published his "Theory of Political 
Economy" in 1871, it was already widely felt that a 
simple imaginary man, or even a composite picture 
made up of a series of different simple imaginary men, 
although useful in answering examination questions, 
was of very little use in drafting a Factory Act or 
arbitrating on a sliding scale of wages. Jevons there- 
fore based his economic method upon the variety and 
not the uniformity of individual instances. He arranged 
the hours of labour in a working day, or the units of 
satisfaction from spending money, on curves of increase 
and decrease, and employed mathematical methods to 
indicate the point where one curve, whether represent- 
ing an imaginary estimate or a record of ascertained 
facts, would cut the others to the best advantage. 

Here was something which corresponded, however 

^Economic Studies (Longmans, 1895), p. 98. 



160 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

roughly, to the process by which practical people 
arrived at practical and responsible results. A railway 
manager who wishes to discover the highest rate of 
charges which his traffic will bear is not interested 
if he is told that the rate when fixed will have been 
due to the law that all men seek to obtain wealth with 
as little effort as possible, modified in its working by 
men's unwillingness to break an established business 
habit. He wants a method which, instead of merely 
providing him with a verbal "explanation" of what has 
happened, will enable him to form a quantitative 
estimate of what under given circumstances will hap- 
pen. He can, however, and, I believe, now often does, 
use the Jevonian method to work out definite results in 
half-pennies and tons from the intersection of plotted 
curves recording actual statistics of rates and traffic. 

Since Jevons's time the method which he initiated 
has been steadily extended; economic and statistical 
processes have become more nearly assimilated, and 
problems of fatigue or acquired skill, of family affection 
and personal thrift, of management by the entrepreneur 
or the paid official, have been stated and argued in 
quantitative folrm/. As Professor Marshall said the 
other day, qualitative reasoning in economics is passing 
away and quantitative reasoning is beginning to take its 
place.^ 

1 Journal of Economics, March 1907, pp. 7 and 8. "What by chemical 
analogy may be called qualitative analysis has done the greater part of its 
work. . . . Much less progress has indeed been made towards the quan- 
titative determination of the relative strength of different enconomic 



IVIETHODOFREASONING 161 

Hov/ far is a similar change of method possible 
in the discussion not of industrial and financial proc- 
esses but of the structure and working of political 
institutions? 

It is of course easy to pick out political questions 
which can obviously be treated by quantitative methods. 
One may take, for instance, the problem of the best size 
for a debating hall, to be used, say, by the Federal 
Deliberative Assembly of the British Empire — assuming 
that the shape is already settled. The main elements 
of the problem are that the hall should be large enough 
to accommodate with dignity a number of members 
sufficient both for the representation of interests and 
the carrymg out of committee work, and not too large 
for each member to listen without strain to a debate. 
The resultant size will represent a compromise among 
these elements, accommodating a number smaller than 
would be desirable if the need of representation and 
dignity alone were to be considered, and larger than 
it would be if the convenience of debate alone were 
considered. 

A body of economists could agree to plot out or 
imagine a succession of "curves" representing the 
advantages to be obtained from each additional unit of 
size in dignity, adequacy of representation, supply of 
members for committee work, healthiness, etc., and the 
disadvantage of each additional unit of size as affect- 
forces. That higher and more difficult task must wait upon the slow 
growth of thorough realistic statistics." 



162 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

ing convenience of debate, etc. The curves of dignity 
and adequacy might be the result of direct estimation. 
The curve of marginal convenience in audibility would 
be founded upon actual "polygons of variation" record- 
ing measurements of the distance at which a sufficient 
number of individuals of the classes and ages expected 
could hear and make themselves heard in a room of 
that shape. The economists might further, after dis- 
cussion, agree on the relative importance of each 
element to the final decision, and might give effect to 
their agreement by the familiar statistical device of 
"weighting." 

The answer would perhaps provide fourteen square 
feet on the floor in a room twenty-six feet high for 
each of three hundred and seventeen members. There 
would, when the answer was settled, be a "marginal" 
man in point of hearing (representing, perhaps, an 
average healthy man of seventy-four), who would be 
unable or just able to hear the "marginal" man in point 
of clearness of speech — ^who might represent (on a 
polygon specially drawn up by the Oxford Professor 
of Biology) the least audible but two of the tutors at 
Balliol. The marginal point on the curve of the 
decreasing utility of successive increments of members 
from the point of view of committee work might show, 
perhaps, that such work must either be reduced to a 
point far below that which is usual in national parlia- 
ments, or must be done very largely by persons not 
members of the assembly itself. The aesthetic curve 



M E T H D F R E A S N I N G 163 

' — — ^^^ 

of dignity might be cut at the point where the President 
of the Society of British Architects could just be induced 
not to write to the Times. 

Any discussion which took place on such lines, even 
although the curves were mere forms of speech, would 
be real and practical. Instead of one man reiterating 
that the Parliament Hall of a great empire ought to 
represent the dignity of its task, and another man 
answering that a debating assembly which cannot debate 
is of no use, both would be forced to ask ''How much 
dignity"? and "How much debating convenience"? As 
it is, this particular question seems often to be settled 
by the architect, who is deeply concerned with aesthetic 
effect, and not at all concerned with debating conven- 
ience. The reasons that he gives in his reports seem 
convincing, because the other considerations are not 
in the minds of the Building Committee, w^ho think of 
one element only of the problem at a time, and make 
no attempt to co-ordinate all the elements. Otherwise 
it would be impossible to explain the fact that the Debat- 
ing Hall, for instance, of the House of Representatives 
at Washington is no more fitted for debates carried on 
by human beings than would a spoon ten feet broad be 
fitted for the eating of soup. The able leaders of the 
National Congress movement in India made the same 
mistake in 1907, when they arranged, with their minds 
set only on the need of an impressive display, that 
difficult and exciting questions of tactics should be dis- 
cussed by about fifteen hundred delegates in a huge tent, 



164 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

and in the presence of a crowd of nearly ten thousand 
spectators. I am afraid that it is not unlikely that the 
London County Council may also despise the quantita- 
tive method of reasoning on such questions, and may 
find themselves in 1912 provided with a new hall admir- 
ably adapted to illustrate the dignity of London and 
the genius of their architect, but unfitted for any other 
purpose. 

Nor is the essence of the quantitative method changed 
when the answer is to be found, not in one, but in 
several "unknov/n quantities." Take, for instance, the 
question as to the best types of elementary school to be 
provided in London. If it were assumed that only one 
type of school was to be provided, the problem would 
be stated in the same form as that of the size of the 
Debating Hall. But it is possible in most London 
districts to provide within easy walking distance of 
every child four or five schools of different types, and 
the problem becomes that of so choosing a limited 
number of types as to secure that the degree of "misfit" 
between child and curriculum shall be as small as pos- 
sible. If we treat the general aptitude (or "cleverness") 
of the children as differing only by more or less, the 
problem becomes one of fitting the types of school to 
a fairly exactly ascertainable polygon of intellectual 
variation. It might appear then that the best results 
would come from the provision, say, of five types of 
schools, providing respectively for the 2 per cent, of 



METHOD OF REASONING 165 

greatest natural cleverness, the succeeding 10 per cent., 
the intermediate 76 per cent., the comparatively sub- 
normal 10 per cent., and the 2 per cent, of ''mentally 
deficient." That is to say the local authority would have 
to provide in that proportion Secondary, Higher Grade, 
Ordinar)% Sub-Normal; and Mentally Deficient schools. 

A general improvement in nutrition and other home 
circumstances might tend to "steepen" the polygon of 
variation, i. e. to bring more children near the normal, 
or it might increase the number of children with 
exceptional inherited cleverness who were able to reveal 
tiiat fact, and so "flatten" it; and either case might make 
a change desirable in the best proportion between the 
types of schools or even in the number of the types. 

It w^ould be more difficult to induce a committee of 
politicians to agree on the plotting of curves, represent- 
ing the social advantage to be obtained by the succes- 
sive increments of satisfaction in an urban industrial 
populatioii of those needs which are indicated by the 
terms Socialism and Individualism. They could, how- 
ever, be brought to admit that the discovery of curves 
for that purpose is a matter of observation and inquiry, 
and that tlie best possible distribution of social duties 
between the individual and the state would cut both 
at some point or other. For many Socialists and 
Individualists the mere attempt to think in such a way 
of their problem would be an extremely valuable exer- 
cise. If a Socialist and an Individualist were required 



166 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

even to ask themselves the question, "How much Social- 
ism?" or "How much Individualism?" a basis of real 
discussion would be arrived at — even in the impossible 
case that one should answer, "All Individualism and 
no Socialism," and the other, "All Socialism and no 
Individualism." 

The fact, of course, that each step towards either 
Socialism or Individualism changes the character of 
the other elements in the problem, or the fact that 
an invention like printing, or representative govern- 
ment, or Civil Service examinations, or the Utilitarian 
philosophy, may make it possible to provide greatly 
increased satisfaction both to Socialist and Individualist 
desires, complicates the question, but does not alter 
its quantitative character. The essential point is that 
in every case in which a political thinker is able to 
adopt what Professor Marshall calls the quantitative 
method of reasoning, his vocabulary and method, 
instead of constantly suggesting a false simplicity, warn 
him that every individual instance with which he deals 
is different from any other, that any effect is a func- 
tion of many variable causes, and, therefore, that no 
estimate of the result of any act can be accurate unless 
all its conditions and their relative importance are taken 
into account. 

But how far are such quantitative methods possible 
when a statesman is dealing, neither with an obviously 
quantitative problem, like the building of halls or 
schools, nor with an attempt to give quantitative mean- 



METHOD OF REASONING 167 

■ ■■ < 

ing to abstract terms like Socialism or Individualism, 
but with the enormous complexity of responsible leg- 
islation? 

In approaching this question we shall be helped if 
we keep before us a description of the way in which 
some one statesman has, in fact, thought of a great 
constitutional problem. 

Take, for instance, the indications which Mr. Morley 
gives of the thinking done by Gladstone on Home Rule 
during the autumn and winter of 1885—86. Gladstone, 
we are told, had already, for many years past, pondered 
anxiously at intervals about Ireland, and now he de- 
scribes himself as "thinking incessantly about the mat- 
ter" (vol. iii. p. 264), and "preparing myself by study 
and reflection" (p. 273). 

He has first to consider the state of feeling in Eng- 
land and Ireland, and to calculate to what extent and 
under what influences it may be expected to change. 
As to English feeling, "what I expect," he says, "is a 
healthy slow fermentation in many minds working 
towards the final product" (p. 261). The Irish desire 
for self-government, on the other hand, will not change, 
and must be taken, within the time-limit of his problem, 
as "fixed" (p. 240) . In both England and Ireland, how- 
ever, he believes that "mutual attachment" may grow 
(p. 292). 

Before making up his mind in favour of some kind 
of Home Rule, he examines every thinkable alterna- 
tive, especially the development of Irish County Gov- 



168 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

ernment, or a Federal arrangement in which all three of 
the united kingdoms would be concerned. Here and 
there he finds suggestions in the history of Austria- 
Hungary, of Norway and Sweden, or of the "colonial 
type" of government. Nearly every day he reads Burke, 
and exclaims "what a magazine of wisdom on Ireland 
and America" (p. 280). He gets much help from "a 
chapter on semi-sovereign assemblies in Dicey's "Law of 
the Constitution" (p. 280). He tries to see the question 
from fresh points of view in intimate personal discus- 
sions, and by imagining what "the civilized world" 
(p. 225) will think. As he gets nearer to his subject, 
he has definite statistical reports made for him by 
"Welby and Hamilton on the figures" (p. 306), has "stiff 
conclaves about finance and land" (p. 298), and nearly 
comes to a final split with Parnell on tlie question 
whether the Irish contribution to Imperial taxation shall 
be a fifteenth or a twentieth. 

Time and persons are important factors in his cal- 
culation. If Lord Salisbury will consent to introduce 
some measure of Irish self-government, the problem 
will be fundamentally altered, and the same will hap- 
pen if the general election produces a Liberal majority 
independent of both Irish and Conservatives; and Mr. 
Morley describes as underlying all his calculations "the 
irresistible attraction for him of all the grand and 
eternal commonplaces of liberty and self-government" 
(p. 260). 

It is not likely that Mr. Morley's narrative touches 



METHODOFREASONING 169 

on more than a fraction of the questions which must 
have been in Gladstone's mind during these months 
of incessant thought. No mention is made, for instance, 
of religion, or of the military position, or of the per- 
manent possibility of enforcing the proposed restric- 
tions on self-government. But enough is given to show 
the complexity of political thought at that stage when 
a statesman, still uncommitted, is considering what will 
be the effect of a new political departure. 

What then was the logical process by which Glad- 
stone's final decision was arrived at? 

Did he for instance deal with a succession of simple 
problems or with one complex problem? It is, I think, 
clear that from time to time isolated and comparatively 
simple trains of reasoning were followed up; but it is 
also clear that Gladstone's main effort of thought was 
involved in the process of co-ordinating all the labori- 
ously collected contents of his mind onto the whole 
problem. This is emphasized by a quotation in which 
Mr. Morley, who was closely associated with Gladstone's 
intellectual toil during this period, indicates his own 
recollection. 

"Historians," he quotes from Professor Gardiner, 
"coolly dissect a man's thoughts as they please; and 
label them like specimens in a naturalist's cabinet. 
Such a thing, they argue, was done for mere personal 
aggrandizement; such a thing for national objects, such 
a thing from high religious motives. In real life we 
may be sure it was not so" (p. 277) . 



170 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

,— — ^ > 

And it is clear that in spite of the ease and delight 
with which Gladstone's mind moved among "the eternal 
commonplaces of liberty and self-government," he is 
seeking throughout for a quantitative solution. "Home 
Rule" is no simple entity for him. He realizes that the 
number of possible schemes for Irish government is 
infinite, and he attempts to make at every point in his 
own scheme a delicate adjustment between many varying 
forces. 

A large part of this work of complex co-ordination 
was apparently in Mr. Gladstone's case unconscious. 
Throughout the chapters one has the feeling — ^which 
any one who has had to make less important political 
decisions can parallel from his own experience — ^that 
Gladstone was waiting for indications of a solution to 
appear in his mind. He was conscious of his effort, 
conscious also that his effort was being directed sim- 
ultaneously towards many different considerations, but 
largely unconscious of the actual process of inference, 
which went on perhaps more rapidly when he was asleep, 
or thinking of something else, than when he was awake 
and attentive. A phrase of Mr. Morley's indicates a 
feeling with which every politician is familiar. "The 
reader," he says, "knows in what direction the main cur- 
rent of Mr. Gladstone's thought must have been setting" 
(p. 236). 

That is to say, we are watching an operation rather 
of art than of science, of long experience and trained 
faculty rather than of conscious method. 



METHODOFREASONING 171 

' ■ — < 

But the history of human progress consists in the 
gradual and partial substitution of science for art, of the 
power over nature acquired in youth by study, for that 
which comes in late middle age as the half -conscious 
result of experience. Our problem therefore involves 
the further question, whether those forms of political 
thought which correspond to the complexity of nature 
are teachable or not? At present they are not often 
taught. In every generation thousands of young men 
and women are attracted to politics because their intel- 
lects are keener, and their sympathies wider than those 
of their fellows. They become followers of Liberalism 
or Imperialism, of Scientific Socialism or tlie Rights of 
Men or Women. To them, at first. Liberalism and the 
Empire, Rights and Principles, are real and simple 
things. Or, like Shelley, they see in the whole human 
race an infinite repetition of uniform individuals, the 
"millions on millions" who "wait, firm, rapid, and 
elate." ^ 

About all these things they argue by the old a priori 
methods which we have inherited with our political 
language. But after a time a sense of unreality grows 
upon them. Knowledge of the complex and difficult 
world forces itself into their minds. Like the old 
Chartists with whom I once spent an evening, they tell 
you that their politics have been "all talk" — all words — 
and there are few among them, except those to whom 
politics has become a profession or a caieer, who hold 

1 Shelley, Poetical Works (H. B. Forman), vol. iv. p. 8. 



172 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

. ■ ■■ — 1 

on until through weariness and disappointment they 
learn new confidence from new knowledge. Most men, 
after the first disappointment, fall back on habit or 
party spirit for their political opinions and actions. 
Having ceased to think of their unknown fellow citizens 
as uniform repetitions of a simple type, they cease to 
think of them at all; and content themselves with using 
party phrases about the mass of mankind, and realizing 
the individual existence of their casual neighbours. 

Wordsworth's "Prelude" describes with pathetic clear- 
ness a mental history, which must have been that of 
many thousands of men who could not write great poetry, 
and whose moral and intellectual forces have been 
blunted and wasted by political disillusionment. He 
tells us that the "man" whom he loved in 1792, when 
the French Revolution was still at its dawn, was seen 
in 1798 to be merely "the composition of the brain." 
After agonies of despair and baffled affection, he saw 
"the individual man. . .the man whom we behold with 
our own eyes." ^ But in that change from a false sim- 
plification of the whole to the mere contemplation of 
the individual, Wordsworth's power of estimating politi- 
cal forces or helping in political progress was gone for 
ever. 

If this constantly repeated disappointment is to 
cease, quantitative method must spread in politics and 
must transform the vocabulary and the associations of 

1 The Prelude, Bk. xiii., 11. 81-84. 



METHOD OF REASONING 173 

that mental world into which the young politician enters. 
Fortunately such a change seems at least to be beginning. 
Ever}- year larger and more exact collections of detailed 
political facts are being accumulated; and collections 
of detailed facts, if they are to be used at all in politi- 
cal reasoning, must be used quantitatively. The intel- 
lectual work of preparing legislation, whether carried 
on by permanent officials or Royal Commissions or 
Cabinet Ministers takes every year a more quantitative 
and a less qualitative form. 

Compare for instance the methods of the present 
Commission on the Poor Law with those of the cele- 
brated and extraordinarily able Commission which drew 
up the New Poor Law in 1833-34. The argument of 
the earlier Commissioners' Report runs on lines which 
it would be easy to put in a priori syllogistic form. 
All men seek pleasure and avoid pain. Society ought 
to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure 
to social conduct. This may be done by making every 
man's livelihood and that of his children normally 
dependent upon his own exertions, by separating those 
destitute persons who cannot do work useful to the 
community from those who can, and by presenting 
these last with the alternative of voluntary effort or 
painful restriction. This leads to "a principle which 
we jSnd universally admitted, even by those whose prac- 
tice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the 
pauper] on the whole shall not be made really or 



174 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

apparently so eligible as the situation of the indepen- 
dent labourer of the lowest class." ^ The a priori argu- 
ment is admirably illustrated by instances, reported by 
the sub-commissioners or given in evidence before the 
Commission, indicating that labouring men will not 
exert themselves unless they are offered the alternative 
of starvation or rigorous confinement, though no attempt 
is made to estimate the proportion of the working popu- 
lation of England whose character and conduct is 
represented by each instance. 

This a priori deduction, illustrated, but not proved 
by particular instances, is throughout so clear and so 
easily apprehended by the ordinary man that the 
revolutionary Bill of 1834, which affected all sorts of 
vested interests, passed the House of Commons by a 
majority of four to one and the House of Lords by a 
majority of six to one. 

The Poor Law Commission of 1905, on the other 
hand, though it contains many members trained in the 
traditions of 1834, is being driven, by the mere necessity 
of dealing with the mass of varied evidence before it, 
onto new lines. Instead of assuming half consciously 
that human energy is dependent solely on the working 
of the human will in the presence of the ideas of pleasure 
and pain, the Commissioners are forced to tabulate and 
consider innumerable quantitative observations relating 
to the very many factors affecting the will of paupers 

1 First Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1834 (reprinted 1894) , 
p. 187. 



METHOD OF REASONING 175 

and possible paupers. They cannot, for instance, avoid 
the task of estimating the relative industrial effectiveness 
of health, which depends upon decent surroundings; of 
hope, which may be made possible by State provision 
for old age; and of the imaginative range which is the 
result of education; and of comparing all these with the 
"purely economic" motive created by ideas of future 
pleasure and pain. 

The evidence before the Commission is, that is to 
say, collected, not to illustrate general propositions 
otherwise established, but to provide' quantitative 
answers to quantitative questions; and instances are in 
each case accumulated according to a well-known 
statistical rule until the repetition of results shows that 
further accumulation would be useless. 

In 1834 it was enough, in dealing with the political 
machinery of the Poor Law, to argue that, since all men 
desire their own interest, the ratepayers would elect 
guardians who w^ould, up to the limit of their knowledge, 
advance the interests of the whole community ; provided 
that electoral areas were created in which all sectional 
interests were represented, and that voting power were 
given to each ratepayer in proportion to his interest. 
It did not then seem to matter much whether the areas 
chosen were new or old, or whether the body elected 
had other duties or not. 

In 1908, on the other hand, it is felt to be necessary 
to seek for all the causes which are likely to influence 
the mind of the ratepayer or candidate during an 



176 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



election, and to estimate by such evidence as is avail- 
able their relative importance. It has to be considered, 
for instance, whether men vote best in areas where 
they keep up habits of political action in connection 
with parliamentary as well as municipal contests; and 
whether an election involving other points besides poor- 
law administration is more likely to create interest 
among the electorate. If more than one election, again, 
is held in a district in any year it may be found by the 
record of the percentage of votes that electoral enthusi- 
asm diminishes for each additional contest along a very 
rapidly descending curve. 

The final decisions that will be taken either by the 
Commission or by Parliament on questions of adminis- 
trative policy and electoral machinery must therefore 
involve the balancing of all these and many other con- 
siderations by an essentially quantitative process. The 
lines, that is to say, which ultimately cut the curves 
indicated by the evidence will allow less weight either 
to anxiety for the future as a motive for exertion, or to 
personal health as increasing personal efficiency, than 
would be given to either if it were the sole factor to be 
considered. There will be more "bureaucracy" than 
would be desirable if it were not for the need of econo- 
mizing the energies of the elected representatives, and 
less bureaucracy than there would be if it were not 
desirable to retain popular sympathy and consent. 
Throughout the argument the population of England 
will be looked upon not (as John Stuart Mill would 



METHOD OF REASONING 177 

have said) "on the average or en masse," ^ but as con- 
sisting of individuals who can be arranged in "polygons 
of variation" according to their nervous and physical 
strength, their "character" and the degree to which ideas 
of the future are likely to affect their present conduct. 

Meanw^hile the public which will discuss the Report 
has changed since 1834. Newspaper writers, in dis- 
cussing tlie problem of destitution, tend now to use, 
not general terms applied to whole social classes like 
the "poor," "the working class," or "the lower orders," 
but terms expressing quantitative estimates of individual 
variations, like "the submerged tenth," or the "unem- 
ployable"; while every newspaper reader is fairly fa- 
miliar wath the figures in the Board of Trade monthly 
returns which record seasonal and periodical variations 
of actual unemployment among Trade Unionists. 

One could give many other instances of this begin- 
ning of a tendency in political thinking to change from 
qualitative to quantitative forms of argument. But 
perhaps it will be sufficient to give one relating to 
international politics. Sixty years ago sovereignty 
was a simple question of quality. Austin had demon- 
strated that there must be a sovereign everywhere, and 
that sovereignty, whether in the hands of an autocracy 
or a republic, must be absolute. But the Congress 
which in 1885 sat at Berlin to prevent the partition of 
Africa from causing a series of European wars as long 
as those caused by the partition of America, was com- 

1 See p. 132. 



178 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■^■^-■"— "^""""i— ~"~"^~^^— ~^~"~"~'^~""" "^""~"" ' ' 

pelled by the complexity of the problems before it to 
approach the question of sovereignty on quantitative 
lines. Since 1885 therefore every one has become 
familiar with the terms then invented to express grada- 
tions of sovereignty — "Effective occupation," Hinter- 
land," "Sphere of Influence" — to which the Algeciras 
Conference has perhaps added a lowest grade, "Sphere 
of Legitimate Aspiration." It is already as unimportant 
to decide whether a given region is British territory or 
not, as it is to decide whether a bar containing a certain 
percentage of carbon should be called iron or steel. 

Even in thinking of the smallest subdivisions of 
observed political fact some men escape the tempta- 
tion to ignore individual differences. I remember that 
the man who has perhaps done more than any one else 
in England to make a statistical basis for industrial 
legislation possible, once told me that he had been 
spending the whole day in classifying under a few heads 
thousands of "railway accidents," every one of which 
diff'ered in its circumstances from any other; and that 
he felt like the bewildered porter in Punch, who had 
to arrange the subtleties of nature according to the 
unsubtle tariff'-schedule of his company. "Cats," he 
quoted the porter as saying, "is dogs, and guineapigs is 
dogs, but this 'ere tortoise is a hinsect." 

But it must constantly be remembered that quan- 
titative thinking does not necessarily or even generally 
mean thinking in terms of numerical statistics. Num- 
ber, which obliterates all distinction between the units 



METHOD OF REASONING 179 



numbered, is not the only, nor always even the most 
exact means of representing quantitative facts. A 
picture, for instance, may be sometimes nearer to quan- 
titative truth, more easily remembered, and more use- 
ful for purposes of argument and verification than a row 
of figures. The most exact quantitative political docu- 
ment that I ever saw was a set of photographs of all 
the women admitted into an inebriate home. The photo- 
graphs demonstrated, more precisely than any record 
of approximate measurements could have done, the 
varying facts of physical and nervous structure. It 
would have been easily possible for a committee of 
medical men to have arranged the photographs in a 
series of increasing abnormality, and to have indicated 
the photograph of the "marginal" woman in whose 
case, after allowing for considerations of expense, and 
for the desirability of encouraging individual respon- 
sibility, the State should undertake temporary or per- 
manent control. And the record was one which no 
one who had ever seen it could forget. 

The political thinker has indeed sometimes to imitate 
the cabinet-maker, who discards his most finely divided 
numerical rule for some kinds of specially delicate 
work, and trusts to his sense of touch for a quan- 
titative estimation. The most exact estimation possible 
of a political problem may have been contrived when 
a group of men, differing in origin, education, and 
mental type, first establish an approximate agreement 
as to the probable result of a series of possible political 



180 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

alternatives involving, say, increasing or decreasing 
state interference, and then discover the point where 
their "liking" turns into "disliking." Man is the meas- 
ure of man, and he may still be using a quantitative pro- 
cess even though he chooses in each case that method of 
measurement v\rhich is least affected by the imperfection 
of his powers. But it is just in the cases where numeri- 
cal calculation is impossible or unsuitable that the 
politician is likely to get most help by using con- 
sciously quantitative conceptions. 

An objection has been urged against the adoption 
of political reasoning either implicitly or explicitly 
quantitative, that it involves the balancing against each 
other of things essentially disparate. How is one, it 
is asked, to balance the marginal unit of national hon- 
our involved in the continuance of a war with that mar- 
ginal unit of extra taxation which is supposed to be its 
exact equivalent? How is one to balance the final 
sovereign spent on the endowment of science with the 
final sovereign spent on a monument to a deceased 
scientist, or on the final detail in a scheme of old age 
pensions? The obvious answer is that statesmen have 
to act, and that whoever acts does somehow balance all 
the alternatives which are before him. The Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, in his annual allocation of grants and 
remissions of taxations, balances no stranger things than 
does the private citizen, who, having a pound or two 
to spend at Christmas, decides between subscribing to 
a Chinese Mission and providing a revolving hatch 
between his kitchen and his dining-room. 



MATERIAL OF REASONING 181 

A more serious objection is that we ought not to 
allow ourselves to think quantitatively in politics, that 
to do so fritters away the plain consideration of prin- 
ciple. "Logical principles" may be only an inadequate 
representation of the subtlety of nature, but to abandon 
them is, it is contended, to become a mere opportunist. 

In the minds of these objectors the only alternative 
to deductive thought from simple principles seems 
to be the attitude of Prince Biilow, in his speech in 
the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He is reported 
to have said: — "Only the most doctrinaire Socialists 
still regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish 
and as an infallible dogma. For his own part he was 
no worshipper of idols, and he did not believe in politi- 
cal dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a country 
did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form 
of its Constitution or of its franchise. Herr Bebel had 
once said tliat on the whole he preferred English con- 
ditions even to conditions in France. But in England 
tlie franchise was not universal, equal, and direct. 
Could it be said that Mecklenburg, which had no popular 
suffrage at all, was governed worse than Haiti, of 
which the world had lately heard such strange news, 
although Haiti could boast of possessing universal suf- 
frage?" ' 

But what Prince Billow's speech showed, was that 
he was either deliberately parodying a style of scholastic 
reasoning with which he did not agree, or he was 
incapable of grasping the first conception of quantitative 

1 Times, March 27, 1908. 



182 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

political thought. If the "dogma" of universal suffrage 
means the assertion that all men who have votes are 
thereby made identical with each other in all respects, 
and that universal suffrage is the one condition of good 
government, then, and then only, is his attack on it 
valid. If, however, the desire for universal suffrage 
is based on the belief that a wide extension of political 
power is one of the most important elements in the 
conditions of good government — racial aptitude, min- 
isterial responsibility, and the like, being other ele- 
ments — then the speech is absolutely meaningless. 

But Prince Biilow was making a parliamentary 
speech, and in parliamentary oratory that change from 
qualitative to quantitative method which has so deeply 
affected the procedure of Conferences and Commissions 
has not yet made much progress. In a "full-dress" 
debate even those speeches which move us most often 
recall Mr. Gladstone, in whose mind, as soon as he 
stood up to speak, his Eton and Oxford training in words 
always contended with his experience of things, and 
who never made it quite clear whether the "grand and 
eternal commonplaces of liberty and self government" 
meant that certain elements must be of great and per- 
manent importance in every problem of Church and 
State, or that an a priori solution of all political prob- 
lems could be deduced by all good men from absolute 
and authoritative laws. 



PART II 



POSSIBILITIES OF 
PROGRESS 



CHAPTER I 

POLITICAL MORALITY 

In the preceding chapters I have argued that the effi- 
ciency of political science, its power, that is to say, 
of forecasting the results of political causes, is likely 
to increase. I based my argument on two facts, firstly, 
that modem psychology offers us a conception of human 
nature much truer, though more complex, than that 
which is associated with the traditional English politi- 
cal philosophy; and secondly, that, under the influence 
and example of the natural sciences, political thinkers 
are already beginning to use in their discussions and 
inquiries quantitative rather than merely qualitative 
words and methods, and are able therefore both to state 
their problems more fully and to answer them with a 
greater approximation to accuracy. 

In this argument it was not necessary to ask how 
far such an improvement in the science of politics is 
likely to influence the actual course of political history. 
Whatever may be the best way of discovering truth 
will remain the best, whether the mass of mankind 
choose to follow it or not. 

But politics are studied, as Aristotle said, "for the 
sake of action rather than of knowledge," ^ and the 

'^Ethics, Bk. I. ch. iii.(6). 
185 



186 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ 

student is bound, sooner or later, to ask himself what 
will be the effect of a change in his science upon that 
political world in which he lives and works. 

One can imagine, for instance, that a professor of 
politics in Columbia University, who had just taken 
part as a "Mugwump" in a well-fought but entirely- 
unsuccessful campaign against Tammany Hall, might 
say: "The finer and more accurate the processes of 
political science become, the less do they count in 
politics. Astronomers invent every year more delicate 
methods of forecasting the movements of the stars, but 
cannot with all their skill divert one star an inch from 
its course. So we students of politics will find that 
our growing knowledge brings us only a growing sense 
of helplessness. We may learn from our science to 
estimate exactly the forces exerted by the syndicated 
newspaper press, by the liquor saloons, or by the blind 
instincts of class and nationality and race; but how 
can we learn to control them? The fact that we 
think about these things in a new way will not win 
elections or prevent wars." 

I propose, therefore, in this second part of my book to 
discuss how far the new tendencies which are beginning 
to transform the science of politics are likely also to 
make themselves felt as a new political force. I shall 
try to estimate the probable influence of these tendencies, 
not only on the student or the trained politician, but on 
the ordinary citizen whom political science reaches only 
at second or third hand; and, with that intention, shall 



POLITICAL MORALITY 187 

* 

treat in successive chapters their relation to our ideals 
of political morality, to the form and working of the 
representative and official machinery of the State, and to 
the possibilities of international and inter-racial under- 
standing. 

This chapter deals from that point of view with their 
probable influence on political morality. In using that 
term I do not mean to imply that certain acts are moral 
when done from political motives which would not be 
moral if done from other motives, or vice versa, but to 
emphasize the fact that there are certain ethical questions 
which can only be studied in close connection with politi- 
cal science. There are, of course, points of conduct 
which are common to all occupations. We must all try 
to be kind, and honest, and industrious, and we expect 
the general teachers of morals to help us to do so. But 
every occupation has also its special problems, which 
must be stated by its own students before they can be 
dealt with by the moralist at all. 

In politics the most important of these special ques- 
tions of conduct is concerned with the relation between 
the process by which the politician forms his own opin- 
ions and purposes, and that by which he influences the 
opinions and purposes of others. 

A hundred or even fifty years ago, those who worked 
to create a democracy of which they had had as yet no 
experience felt no misgivings on this point. They 
looked on reasoning, not as a difficult and uncertain 
process, but as the necessary and automatic working 



188 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

of man's mind when faced by problems affecting his 
interest. They assumed, therefore, that the citizens 
under a democracy would necessarily be guided by 
reason in the use of their votes, that those politicians 
would be most successful who made their own con- 
clusions and the grounds for them most clear to others, 
and that good government would be secured if the 
voters had sufficient opportunities of listening to free 
and sincere discussion. 

A candidate today who comes fresh from his books 
to the platform almost inevitably begins by making 
the same assumption. He prepares his speeches and 
writes his address with the conviction that on his demon- 
stration of the relation between political causes and 
effects will depend the result of the election. Perhaps 
his first shock will come from that maxim which every 
professional agent repeats over and over again to every 
candidate, "Meetings are no good." Those who attend 
meetings are, he is told, in nine cases out of ten, already 
loyal and habitual supporters of his party. If his 
speeches are logically unanswerable the chief political 
importance of that fact is to be found, not in his power 
of convincing those who are already convinced, but 
in the greater enthusiasm and willingness to canvass 
which may be produced among his supporters by their 
admiration of him as a speaker. 

Later on he learns to estimate the way in which his 
printed "address" and that of his opponent appeal to the 
constituents. He may, for instance, become suddenly 



POLITICAL MORALITY • 189 

t— ^ I 

aware of the attitude of mind with which he himself 
opens the envelopes containing other candidates' ad- 
dresses in some election (of Poor Law Guardians, for 
instance), in which he is not specially interested, 
and of the fact that his attention is either not 
aroused at all, or is only aroused by words and phrases 
which recall some habitual train of thought. By the 
time that he has become sufficiently confident or impor- 
tant to draw up a political program for himself, he 
understands the limits within which any utterance must 
be confined that is addressed to large numbers of 
voters — the fact that proposals are only to be brought 
"within the sphere of practical politics" which are 
simple, striking, and carefully adapted to the half -con- 
scious memories and likes and dislikes of busy men. 
All this means that his own power of political rea- 
soning is being trained. He is learning that every 
man differs from every other man in his interest, his 
intellectual habits and powers, and his experience, and 
that success in the control of political forces depends on 
a recognition of this and a careful appreciation of the 
common factors of human nature. But meanwhile it is 
increasingly difficult for him to believe that he is appeal- 
ing to the same process of reasoning in his hearers as 
that by which he reaches his own conclusions. He tends, 
that is to say, to think of the voters as the subject-matter 
rather than the sharers of his thoughts. He, like 
Plato's sophi&t, is learning what the public is, and is 
beginning to understand "the passions and desires" of 



190 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



that "huge and powerful brute, how to approach and han- 
dle it, at what times it becomes fiercest and most gentle, 
on what occasions it utters its several cries, and what 
sounds made by others soothe or irritate it." ^ If he 
resolutely guards himself against the danger of passing 
from one illusion to another, he may still remember that 
he is not the only man in the constituency who has 
reasoned and is reasoning about politics. If he does 
personal canvassing he may meet sometimes a middle- 
aged working man, living nearer than himself to the 
facts of life, and may find that this constituent of his has 
reasoned patiently and deeply on politics for thirty 
years, and that he himself is a rather absurd item in the 
material of that reasoning. Or he may talk with a 
business man, and be forced to understand some one who 
sees perhaps more clearly than himself the results of his 
proposals, but who is separated from him by the gulf of 
a difference of desire: that which one hopes the other 
fears. 

Yet however sincerely such a candidate may respect 
the process by which the more thoughtful both of those 
who vote for him and of those who vote against him 
reach their conclusions, he is still apt to feel that his own 
part in the election has little to do with any reasoning 
process at all. I remember that before my first elec- 
tion my most experienced political friend said to me, 
"Remember that you are undertaking a six weeks' adver- 
tising campaign." Time is short, there are innumerable 

1 Plato, Republic, p. 493. 



POLITICAL MORALITY 191 

' ' ' -..— — ^— a^.^— — .»^— — ^— — < 

details to arrange, and the candidate soon returns from 
the rare intervals of mental contact with individual elec- 
tors to that advertising campaign which deals with the 
electors as a whole. As long as he is so engaged, the 
maxim that it is wrong to appeal to anything but the 
severest process of logical thought in his constituents 
will seem to him, if he has time to think of it, not so 
much untrue as irrelevant. 

After a time, the politician may cease even to desire 
to reason with his constituents, and may come to regard 
them as purely irrational creatures of feeling and opin- 
ion, and himself as the purely rational "overman" who 
controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and 
able statesman may become most efficient and most 
dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach 
his "Patriot King" how to govern men by understanding 
them, spoke in a haunting phrase of "that staring timid 
creature man." ^ A century before Darwin he, like Swift 
and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to 
see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, 
was one of those few "among the societies of men . . . 
who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who 
are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who are 
designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human 
kind." ^ For the rest, "Reason has small effect upon 
numbers : a turn of imagination, often as violent and as 
sudden as a gust of wind, determines their conduct. 

1 Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, etc. (ed. of 1785), p. 70. 

2 Ibid., p. 2. ^ Ibid., p. 165. 



59 3 



192 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

The greatest of Bolingbroke's disciples was Disraeli, 
who wrote, 'We are not indebted to the Reason of man 
for any of the great achievements which are the land- 
marks of human action and human progress. . . . Man 
is only truly great when he acts from the passions ; never 
irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. 
Even Mormon accounts more votaries than Bentham." ^ 
It was Disraeli who treated Queen Victoria "like a 
woman," and Gladstone, with the Oxford training from 
which he never fully recovered, who treated her "like 
a public meeting." 

In spite of Disraeli's essentially kindly spirit, his 
calculated play upon the instincts of the nation which 
he governed seemed to many in his time to introduce 
a cold and ruthless element into politics, which seemed 
colder and more ruthless when it appeared in the less 
kindly character of his disciple Lord Randolph 
Churchill. But the same ruthlessness is often found 
now, and may perhaps be more often found in the future, 
whenever any one is sufficiently concentrated on some 
political end to break through all intellectual or ethical 
conventions that stand in his way. I remember a long 
talk, a good many years ago, with one of the leaders of 
the Russian terrorist movement. He said, "It is no use 
arguing with the peasants even if we were permitted 
to do so. They are influenced by events not words. If 
we kill a Tzar, or a Grand Duke, or a minister, our 
movement becomes something which exists and counts 

* Coningsby, ch. xiii. 



POLITICAL MORALITY 193 

with them, otherwise, as far as they are concerned, it 
does not exist at all." 

In war, the vague political tradition that there is 
something unfair in influencing the will of one's fellow- 
men otherwise than by argument does not exist. This 
was what Napoleon meant when he said, "A la guerre, 
tout est moral, et le moral et I'opinion font plus de la 
moitie de la realite." ^ And it is curious to observe 
that when men are consciously or half-consciously 
determining to ignore that tradition they drop into the 
language of warfare. Twenty years ago, the expres- 
sion "Class-war" was constantly used among English 
Socialists to justify the proposal that a Socialist party 
should adopt those methods of parliamentary terrorism 
(as opposed to parliamentary argument) which had been 
invented by Pamell. When Lord Lansdowne in 1906 
proposed to the House of Lords that they should abandon 
any calculation of the good or bad administrative effect 
of measures sent to them from the Liberal House of 
Commons, and consider only the psychological effect 
of their acceptance or rejection on the voters at the 
next general election, he dropped at once into military 
metaphor. "Let us" he said, "be sure that if we join 
issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as 
possible to ourselves. In this case I believe the ground 
would be unfavourable to this House, and I believe the 
juncture is one when, even if we were to win for the 
moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end." ^ 

1 Maximes de Guerre et Pensees de Napoleon /^^ (Qiapelot) , p. 230. 

2 Hansard (Trades Disputes Bill, House of Lords, Dec. 4, 1906) , p. 703. 



194 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

At first sight, therefore, it might appear that the 
change in political science which is now going on will 
simply result in the abandonment by the younger 
politicians of all etliical traditions, and the adoption by 
fhem, as the result of their new book-learning, of those 
methods of exploiting the irrational elements of human 
nature which have hitherto been the trade secret of the 
elderly and the disillusioned. 

I have been told, for instance, that among the little 
group of women who in 1906 and 1907 brought the 
question of Women's Suffrage within the sphere of 
practical politics, was one who had received a serious 
academic training in psychology, and that the tactics 
actually employed were in large part due to her plea 
that in order to make men think one must begin by 
making them feel.^ 

A Hindoo agitator, again, Mr. Chandra Pal, who also 
had read psychology, imitated Lord Lansdowne a few 
months ago by saying, "Applying the principles of 
psychology to the consideration of political problems 
we find it necessary that we . . . should do nothing 
that will make the Government a power for us. Because 
if the Government becomes easy, if it becomes pleasant, 
if it becomes good government, then our signs of separa- 
tion from it will be gradually lost." ^ Mr. Chandra Pal, 

1 Mrs. Pankhurst is reported in the Observer of July 26, 1908, to have 
said, "Whatever the women who are called Suffragists might be, they at 
least understood how to bring themselves in touch with the public. They 
had caught the spirit of the age, learnt the art of advertising." 

2 Quoted in Times, June 3, 1907. 



POLITICAL MORALITY 195 



unlike Lord Lansdowne, was shortly afterwards im- 
prisoned, but his words have had an important political 
effect in India. 

If this mental attitude and the tactics based on it 
succeed, they must, it may be argued, spread with con- 
stantly increasing rapidity; and just as, by Gresham's 
Law in commerce, base coin, if there is enough of it, 
must drive out sterling coin, so in politics, must the 
easier and more immediately effective drive out the 
more difficult and less effective method of appeal. 

One cannot now answer such an argument by a 
mere statement that knowledge will make men wise. 
It was easy in the old days to rely on the belief that 
human life and conduct would become perfect if men 
only learnt to know themselves. Before Darwin, most 
political speculators used to sketch a perfect polity 
which would result from the complete adoption of their 
principles, the republics of Plato and of More, Bacon's 
Atlantis, Locke's plea for a government which should 
consciously realize the purposes of God, or Bentham's 
Utilitarian State securely founded upon the Table of 
the Springs of Action. We, however, who live after 
Darwin, have learnt the hard lesson that we must not 
expect knowledge, however full, to lead us to perfec- 
tion. The modern student of physiology believes that 
if his work is successful, men may have better health 
than they would have if they were more ignorant, but 
he does not dream of producing a perfectly healthy 
nation; and he is al>yays prepared to face the discovery 



196 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

that biological causes which he cannot control may be 
tending to make health worse. Nor does the writer on 
education now argue that he can make perfect char- 
acters in his schools. If our imaginations ever start 
on the old road to Utopia, we are checked by remem- 
bering that we are blood-relations of the other animals, 
and that we have no more right than our kinsfolk to sup- 
pose that the mind of the universe has contrived that we 
can find a perfect life by looking for it. The bees 
might to-morrow become conscious of their own nature, 
and of the waste of life and toil which goes on in the 
best ordered hive. And yet they might learn that no 
greatly improved organization was possible for crea- 
tures hampered by such limited powers of observation 
and inference, and enslaved by such furious passions. 
They might be forced to recognize that as long as they 
were bees their life must remain bewildered and vio- 
lent and short. Political inquiry deals with man as 
he now is, and with the changes in the organization of 
his life that can be made during the next few centuries. 
It may be that some scores of generations hence, we 
shall have discovered that the improvements in govern- 
ment which can be brought about by such inquiry are 
insignificant when compared with the changes which 
will be made possible when, through the hazardous 
experiment of selective breeding we have altered the 
human type itself. 

But however anxious we are to see the facts of our 
existence without illusion, and to hope nothing with- 



POLITICAL MORALITY 197 

out cause, we can still draw some measure of comfort 
from the recollection that during the few thousand 
years through which we can trace political history in 
the past, man, without changing his nature, has made 
enormous improvements in his polity, and that those 
improvements have often been the result of new moral 
ideals formed under the influence of new knowledge. 

The ultimate and wider effect on our conduct of 
any increase in our knowledge may indeed be very 
diff'erent from, and more important than, its immediate 
and narrower eff"ect. We each of us live our lives in 
a pictured universe, of which only a small part is 
contributed by our own observation and memory, and 
by far the greater part by what we have learnt from 
others. The changes in that mental picture of our 
environment made for instance by the discovery of 
America, or the ascertainment of the true movements 
of the nearer heavenly bodies, exercised an influence on 
men's general conception of their place in the universe, 
which proved ultimately to be more important than 
their immediate effect in stimulating explorers and 
improving the art of na/vigation. But none of the 
changes of outlook in the past have approached in 
their extent and significance those which have been 
in progress during the last fifty years, the new history 
of man and his surroundings, stretching back through 
hitherto unthought-of ages, the substitution of an 
illimitable vista of ever changing worlds for the 
imagined perfection of the ordered heavens, and above 



198 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

all the intrusion of science into the most intimate 
regions of ourselves. The effects of such changes often 
come, it is true, more slowly than we hope. I was 
talking not long ago to one of the ablest of those who 
were beginning their intellectual life when Darwin pub- 
lished the "Origin of Species." He told me how he and 
his philosopher brother expected that at once all things 
should become new, and how unwillingly as the years 
went on they had accepted their disappointment. But 
though slow, they are far-reaching. 

To myself it seems that the most important political 
result of the vast range of new knowledge started by 
Darwin's work may prove to be the extension of the idea 
of conduct so as to include the control of mental proc- 
esses of which at present most men are either uncon- 
scious or unobservant. The limits of our conscious 
conduct are fixed by the limits of our self-knowledge. 
Before men knew anger as something separable from 
the self that knew it, and before they had made that 
knowledge current by the invention of a name, the con- 
trol of anger was not a question of conduct. Anger 
was a part of the angry man himself, and could only be 
checked by the invasion of some other passion, love, 
for instance, or fear, which was equally, while it lasted, 
a part of self. The man survived to continue his race 
if anger or fear or love came upon him at the right time, 
and with the right intensity. But when man had named 
his anger, and could stand outside it in thought, anger 
came within the region of conduct. Henceforth, in that 



POLITICAL MORALITY 199 

respect, man could choose either the old way of half- 
conscious obedience to an impulse which on the whole 
had proved useful in his past evolution, or the new way 
of fully conscious control directed by a calculation of 
results. 

A man who has become conscious of the nature of 
fear, and has acquired the power of controlling it, if 
he sees a boulder bounding towards him down a tor- 
rent bed, may either obey the immediate impulse to 
leap to one side, or may substitute conduct for instinct, 
and stand where he is because he has calculated that at 
the next bound the course of the boulder will be deflected. 
If he decides to stand he may be wrong. It may prove 
by the event that the immediate impulse of fear was, 
owing to the imperfection of his powers of conscious 
inference, a safer guide than the process of calculation. 
But because he has the choice, even the decision to fol- 
low impulse is a question of conduct. Burke was sin- 
cerely convinced that men's power of political reason- 
ing was so utterly inadequate to their task, that all his 
life long he urged the English nation to follow prescrip- 
tion, to obey, that is to say, on principle their habitual 
political impulses. But the deliberate following of pre- 
scription which Burke advocated was something differ- 
ent, because it was the result of choice, from the uncal- 
culated loyalty of the past. Those who have eaten of 
the tree of knowledge cannot forget. 

In other matters than politics the influence of the 
fruit of that tree is now spreading further over our lives, 



200 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

_— -.-i.^ — — — — > 

Whether we will or not, the old unthinking obedience 
to appetite in eating is more and more affected by our 
knowledge, imperfect though that be, of the physio- 
logical results of the quantity and kind of our food. 
Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops in the play, 
against those who complicate the life of man, and tells 
us to eat "caviare on impulse," instead of "grape nuts 
on principle." ^ But since we cannot unlearn our know- 
ledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to eat caviare on 
principle. The physician, when he knows the part which 
mental suggestion plays in the cure of disease, may 
hate and fear his knowledge, but he cannot divest him- 
self of it. He finds himself watching the unintended 
effects of his words and tones and gestures, until he 
realizes that in spite of himself he is calculating the 
means by which such effects can be produced. After 
a time, even his patients may learn to watch the effect 
of "a good bedside manner" on themselves. 

So in politics, now that knowledge of the obscurer 
impulses of mankind is being spread (if only by the 
currency of new words), the relation both of the poli- 
tician and the voter to those impulses is changing. As 
soon as American politicians called a certain kind of 
specially paid orator a "spell-binder," the word pene- 
trated through the newspapers from politicians to 
audiences. The man who knows that he has paid two 
dollars to sit in a hall and be "spell-bound," feels, it is 
true, the old sensations, but feels them with a subtle 

1 Heretics, 1905, p. 136. 



POLITICAL MORALITY 201 

and irrevocable difference. The English newspaper 
reader who has once heard the word "sensational," may- 
try to submit every morning the innermost sanctuary 
of his consciousness to the trained psychologists of the 
halfpenny journals. He may, according to the sug- 
gestion of the day, loathe the sixty million crafty 
scoundrels who inhabit the German Empire, shudder at 
a coming comet, pity the cowards on the Government 
Front Bench, or tremble lest a pantomime lady should 
throw up her part. But he cannot help the existence 
in the background of his consciousness of a self which 
watches, and, perhaps, is a little ashamed of his "sen- 
sations." Even the rapidly growing psychological com- 
plexity of modern novels and plays helps to complicate 
the relation of the men of our time to their emotional 
impulses. The young tradesman who has been reading 
either "Evan Harrington," or a novel by some writer who 
has read "Evan Harrington," goes to shake hands with 
a countess at an entertainment given by the Primrose 
League, or the Liberal Social Council, conscious of 
pleasure, but to some degree critical of his pleasure. 
His father, who read "John Halifax, Gentleman," would 
have been carried away by a tenth part of the condescen- 
sion which is necessary in the case of the son. A voter 
who has seen "John Bull's Other Island" at the theatre, 
is more likely than his father, who only saw "The 
Shaughraun," to realize that one's feelings on the Irish 
question can be thought about as well as felt. 

In so far as this change extends, the politician may 



202 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

find in the future that an increasing proportion of his 
constituents half-consciously "see through" the cruder 
arts of emotional exploitation. 

But such an unconscious or half -conscious extension 
of self-knowledge is not likely of itself to keep pace 
with the parallel development of the political art of 
controlling impulse. The tendency, if it is to be effec- 
tive, must be strengthened by the deliberate adoption and 
inculcation of new moral and intellectual conceptions — 
new ideal entities to which our affections and desires 
may attach themselves. 

"Science" has been such an entity ever since Francis 
Bacon found again, without knowing it, the path of 
Aristotle's best thought. The conception of "Science," 
of scientific method and the scientific ^spirit, w^as built 
up in successive generations by a few students. At 
first their conception was confined to themselves. Its 
effects were seen in the discoveries which they actually 
made; but to the mass of mankind they seemed little 
better than magicians. Now it has spread to the whole 
world. In every class-room and laboratory in Europe 
and America the conscious idea of Science forms the 
minds and wills of thousands of men and women who 
could never have helped to create it. It has penetrated, 
as the political conceptions of Liberty or of Natural 
Right never penetrated, to non-European races. Arab 
engineers in Khartoum, doctors and nurses and gen- 
erals in the Japanese army, Hindoo and Chinese students 



POLITICAL MORALITY 203 



make of their whole lives an intense activity inspired by 
absolute submission to Science, and not only English or 
American or German town working men, but villagers 
in Italy or Argentina are learning to respect the authority 
and sympathize with the methods of that organized study 
which may double at any moment the produce of their 
crops or check a plague among their cattle. 

"Science" however, is associated by most men, even 
in Europe, only with things exterior to themselves, 
things that can be examined by test-tubes and micro- 
scopes. They are dimly aware that there exists ^ 
science of the mind, but that knowledge suggests to 
them, as yet, no ideal of conduct. 

It is true that in America, where politicians have 
learnt more successfully than elsewhere the art of con- 
trolling other men's unconscious impulses from with- 
out, there have been of late some noteworthy declara- 
tions as to the need of conscious control from within. 
Some of those especially who have been trained in 
scientific method at the American Universities are now 
attempting to extend to politics the scientific concept 
tion of intellectual conduct. But it seems to me that 
much of their preaching misses its mark, because it 
takes the old form of an opposition between "reason" and 
"passion." The President of the University of Yale 
said, for instance, the other day in a powerful address, 
"Every man who publishes a newspaper which appeals 
to the emotions rather than to the intelligence of its 



204 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

readers . . . attacks our political life at a most vulnerable 
point." ^ If forty years ago Huxley had in this way 
merely preached "intelligence" as against "emotions" in 
the exploration of nature, few would have listened to 
him. Men will not take up the "intolerable disease of 
thought" unless their feelings are first stirred, and the 
strength of the idea of Science has been that it does 
touch men's feelings, and draws motive power for 
thought from the passions of reverence, of curiosity, 
and of limitless hope. 

The President of Yale seems to imply that in order 
to reason men must become passionless. He would 
have done better to have gone back to that section of 
the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme 
purpose of the State realizes itself in men's hearts by 
a "harmony" which strengthens the motive force of 
passion, because the separate passions no longer war 
among themselves, but are concentrated on an end dis- 
covered by the intellect. ^ 

In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed 
to feeling is peculiarly ineffective, because the feelings 
of mankind not only provide a motive for political 
thought but also fix the scale of values which must be 
used in political judgment. One finds oneself, when 
trying to realize this, falling back (perhaps because 
one gets so little help from current language) upon 
Plato's favourite metaphor of the arts. In music the 

1 A. T. Hadley in Munsey's Magazine, 1907. 
2 Cf. Plate's Republic, Book iv. 



POLITICAL MORALITY 205 

noble and the base composers are not divided by the 
fact that the one appeals to the intellect and the other 
to the feelings of his hearers. Both must make their 
appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realize 
intensely their own feelings. The conditions under 
which they succeed or fail are fixed, for both, by facts 
in our emotional nature which they cannot change. 
One, however, appeals by easy tricks to part only of 
the nature of his hearers, while the other appeals to 
their whole nature, requiring of those who would fol- 
low him that for the time their intellect should sit 
enthroned among the strengthened and purified passions. 
But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to 
spread the conception of such a harmony of reason 
and passion, of thought and impulse, in political motive? 
One thinks of education, and particularly of scientific 
education. But the imaginative range which is neces- 
sary if students are to transfer the conception of intel- 
lectual conduct from the laboratory to the public meet- 
ing is not common. It w^ould perhaps more often exist 
if part of all scientific education were given to such a 
study of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their 
mental history as well as their discoveries, if, for 
instance, the young biologist were set to read the cor- 
respondence between Darwin and Lyell, when Lyell was 
preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his great 
reputation was based, and suspending his deepest relig- 
ious convictions, in the cause of a truth not yet made 
clear. 



206 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

I * 

But most school children, if they are to learn the 
facts on which the conception of intellectual conduct 
depends, must learn them even more directly. I my- 
self believe that a very simple course on the well- 
ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently 
taught, be quite intelligible to any children of thirteen 
or fourteen who had received some small preliminary 
training in scientific method. Mr. William James's 
chapter on Habit in his "Principles of Psychology" 
would, for instance, if the language were somewhat 
simplified, come well within their range. A town child 
again, lives nowadays in the constant presence of the 
psychological art of advertisement, and could easily be 
made to understand the reason why, when he is sent to get 
a bar of soap, he feels inclined to get that which is most 
widely advertised, and what relation his inclination 
has to that mental process which is most likely to 
result in the buying of good soap. The basis of knowl- 
edge necessary for the conception of intellectual duty 
could further be enlarged at school by the study in 
pure literature of the deeper experiences of the mind, 
A child of twelve might understand Carlyle's "Essay on 
Burns" if it were carefully read in class, and a good 
"sixth form" might learn much from Wordsworth's 
"Prelude." 

The whole question, however, of such deliberate in- 
struction in the emotional and intellectual facts of 
man's nature as may lead men to conceive of the 
co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal 



POLITICAL MORALITY 207 

^—i^^— ^i— W ■ .MLMM ■■II., I ^— — ■ I I, .1. — — ^^M— ^■>^^.^— — — ■— ^^ 

is one on which much steady thinking and observa- 
tion is still required. The instincts of sex, for instance, 
are becoming in all civilized countries more and more 
the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon a 
calculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an 
ever increasing degree control over mere impulse. Yet 
no one is sure that he has found the way to teach the 
barest facts as to sexual instincts either before or during 
the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the 
instincts themselves. 

Doctors, again, are more and more recognizing that 
nutrition depends not only upon the chemical compo- 
sition of food but upon our appetite, and that we can 
become aware of our appetite and to some extent con- 
trol and direct it by our will. Sir William Macewen 
said not long ago, "We cannot properly digest our food 
unless we give it a warm welcome from a free mind 
with the prospect of enjoyment."^ But it would not be 
easy to create by teaching that co-ordination of the 
intellect and impulse at which Sir William Macewen 
hints. If you tell a boy that one reason why food is 
wholesome is because we like it, and that it is there- 
fore our duty to like that food which other facts of our 
nature have made both wholesome and likeable, you 
may find yourself stimulating nothing except his sense 
of humour. 

So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very 
easy to say that the teacher should aim first at making 

1 British Medical Journal, Oct. 8, 1904. 



208 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

his pupils conscious of the existence of those emotions, 
then at increasing their force, and finally at subordin- 
ating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on 
the consequences of political action. But it is extraor- 
dinarily difficult to discover how this can be done 
under the actual conditions of school teaching. Mr. 
Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, in- 
troduced into the Evening School Code a syllabus of 
instruction on the Life and Duties of the Citizen. It 
consisted of statements of the part played in social life 
by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on, accom- 
panied by a moral for each section, such as "serving 
personal interest is not enough," "need of public spirit 
and intelligence for good Government," "need of honesty 
in giving a vote," "the vote a trust as well as a right." 
Almost every school publisher rushed out a text-book on 
the subject, and many School Boards encouraged its 
introduction; and yet the experiment, after a careful 
trial, was an acknowledged failure. The new text-books 
(all of which I had at the time to review), constituted 
perhaps the most worthless collection of printed pages 
that have ever occupied the same space on a bookshelf, 
and the lessons, with their alternations of instruction and 
edification, failed to stimulate any kind of interest in the 
students. If our youths and maidens are to be stirred as 
deeply by the conception of the State as were the pupils 
of Socrates, teachers and the writers of text-books must 
apparently approach their task with something of 



POLITICAL MORALITY 209 

Socrates' passionate love of truth and of the searching 
courage of his dialectic. 

If again, at an earlier age, children still in school are 
to be taught what Mr. Wells calls "the sense of the 
State"^ we may, by remembering Athens, get some indi- 
cation of the conditions on which success depends. 
Children will not learn to love London while getting 
figures by heart as to the millions of her inhabitants and 
the miles of her sewers. If their love is to be roused by 
words, the words must be as beautiful and as simple as 
the chorus in praise of Athens in the "Oedipus Colo- 
neus." But such words are not written except by great 
poets who actually feel what they write, and perhaps 
before we have a poet who loves London as Sophocles 
loved Athens it may be necessary to make London itself 
somewhat more lovely. 

The emotions of children are, however, most easily 
reached not by words but by sights and sounds. If there- 
fore, they are to love the State, they should either be 
taken to see the noblest aspects of the State or those 
aspects should be brought to them. And a public 
building or ceremony, if it is to impress the unflinching 
eyes of childhood, must, like the buildings of Ypres or 
Bruges or the ceremonies of Japan, be in truth impres- 
sive. The beautiful aspect of social life is fortunately 
not to be found in buildings and ceremonies only, and no 
Winchester boy used to come back uninfluenced from a 

^ The Future in America, chapter ix. 



210 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

visit to Father Dolling in the slums of Landport; though 
boys' eyes are even quicker to see what is genuine in 
personal motive than in external pomp. 

More subtle are the difficulties in the way of the 
deliberate intensification by adult politicians of their 
own political emotions. A life-long worker for educa- 
tion on the London School Board once told me that 
when he wearied of his work — when the words of 
reports become mere words, and the figures in the 
returns mere figures — he used to go down to a school 
and look closely at the faces of the children in class 
after class, till the freshness of his impulse came back. 
But for a man who is about to try such an experiment 
on himself even the word "emotion" is dangerous. The 
worker in full work should desire cold and steady, 
not hot and disturbed impulse, and should perhaps keep 
the emotional stimulus of his energy, when it is once 
formed, for the most part below the level of full 
consciousness. The surgeon in a hospital is stimulated 
by every sight and sound in the long rows of beds and 
would be less devoted to his work if he only saw a few 
patients brought to his house. But all that he is 
conscious of during the working hours is the one purpose 
of healing, on which the half -conscious impulses of brain 
and eye and hand are harmoniously concentrated. 

Perhaps indeed most adult politicians would gain 
rather by becoming conscious of new vices than of new 
virtues. Some day, for instance, the word "opinion" 
itself may become the recognized name of the most 



POLITICAL MORALITY 211 

dangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves 
by habit and association to suspect those inclinations 
and beliefs which, if they neglect the duty of thought, 
appear in their minds they know not how, and which, 
as long as their origin is not examined, can be created 
by any clever organizer who is paid to do so. The 
most easily manipulated State in the world would be 
one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist business men 
who never followed up a train of political reasoning in 
their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the 
existence of a strong political conviction in their minds, 
should announce that it was a matter of "conscience" and 
therefore beyond the province of doubt or calculation. 

But, it may be still asked, is it not Utopian to suppose 
that Plato's conception of the Harmony of the Soul — the 
intensification both of passion and of thought by their 
conscious co-ordination — can ever become a part of the 
general political ideals of a modern nation? Perhaps 
most men before the war between Russia and Japan 
would have answered, Yes. Many men would now 
answer, No. The Japanese are apparently in some 
respects less advanced in their conceptions of intellec- 
tual morality than, say, the French. One hears, for 
instance, of incidents which seem to show that liberty of 
thought is not always valued in Japanese universities. 
But both during the years of preparation for the war, 
and during the war itself, there was something in what 
one was told of the combined emotional and intellectual 
attitude of the Japanese, which to a European seemed 



212 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

wholly new. Napoleon contended against the "ideo- 
logues" who saw things as they wished them to be, and 
until he himself submitted to his own illusions he ground 
them to powder. But we associate Napoleon's clear- 
ness of vision with personal selfishness. Here was a 
nation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon 
in his determination to see in warfare not great prin- 
ciples nor picturesque traditions, but hard facts; and 
yet the fire of their patriotism was hotter than Gam- 
betta's. Something of this may have been due to the 
inherited organization of the Japanese race, but more 
seemed to be the effect of their mental environment. 
They had whole-heartedly welcomed that conception of 
Science which in Europe, where it was first elaborated, 
still struggles with older ideals. Science with them 
had allied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea 
of natural law which, since they learnt it through China 
from Hindustan, had always underlain their various 
religions.^ They had acquired, therefore, a mental 
outlook which was determinist without being fatalist, 
and which combined the most absolute submission to 
nature with untiring energy in thought and action. 

One would like to hope that in the West a similiar 
fusion might take place between the emotional and 
philosophical traditions of religion, and the new con- 
ception of intellectual duty introduced by Science. 
The political effect of such a fusion would be enormous. 

1 See Okakura, The Japanese Spirit (1905). 



POLITICAL MORALITY 213 

* . i .< 

But for the moment that hope is not easy. The inevit- 
able conflict between old faith and new knowledge has 
produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a divi- 
sion not only between the conclusions of religion and 
science, but also between the religious and the scien- 
tific habit of mind. The scientific men of to-day no 
longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, as 
their predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doc- 
trine of probability in conduct, the rule that while belief 
must never be fixed, must indeed always be kept open 
for the least indication of new evidence, action, where 
action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely on im- 
perfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on 
the most perfect demonstration. The policy of the last 
Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely 
to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years 
of patient observation, a new biological basis for or- 
ganic evolution. Mental habits count for more in 
politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds 
or evidences. When an English clergyman sits at his 
breakfast-table reading his Times or Mail, his attitude 
towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his 
belief or doubt that he who uttered certain command- 
ments about non-resistance and poverty was God Him- 
self, but by the degree to which he has been trained 
to watch the causation of his opinions. As it is. Dr. 
Jameson's prepared manifesto on the Johannesburg Raid 
stirred most clergymen like a trumpet, and the sugges- 



214 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

tion that the latest socialist member of Parliament is 
not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine 
disgust and despair. 

It may be therefore that the effective influence in poli- 
tics of new ideals of intellectual conduct will have to 
wait for a still wider change of mental attitude, touch- 
ing our life on many sides. Some day the conception 
of a harmony of thought and passion may take the place, 
in the deepest regions of our moral consciousness, of 
our present dreary confusion and barren conflicts. If 
that day comes much in politics which is now impossible 
will become possible. The politician will be able not 
only to control and direct in himself the impulses of 
whose nature he is more fully aware, but to assume in his 
hearers an understanding of his aim. Ministers and 
Members of Parliament may then find their most effec- 
tive form of expression in that grave simplicity of 
speech which in the best Japanese State papers rings 
so strangely to our ears, and citizens may learn to 
look to their representatives, as the Japanese army 
looked to their generals, for that unbought effort of 
the mind by which alone man becomes at once the 
servant and the master of nature. 



CHAPTER II 
REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 

But our growing knowledge of the causation of po- 
litical impulse, and of the conditions of valid political 
reasoning, may be expected to change not only our 
ideals of political conduct but also the structure of our 
political institutions. 

I have already pointed out that the democratic move- 
ment which produced the constitutions under which 
most civilized nations now live, was inspired by a purely 
intellectual conception of human nature which is be- 
coming eveiy year more unreal to us. If, it may then 
be asked, representative democracy was introduced 
under a mistaken view of the conditions of its working, 
will not its introduction prove to have been itself a 
mistake? 

Any defender of representative democracy who rejects 
the traditional democratic philosophy can only answer 
this question by starting again from the beginning, and 
considering what are the ends representation is intended 
to secure, and how far those ends are necessary to 
good government. 

The first end may be roughly indicated by the word 

consent. The essence of a representative government 

215 



216 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

' ' i 

is that it depends on the periodically renewed consent 
of a considerable proportion of the inhabitants; and 
the degree of consent required may shade from the mere 
acceptance of accomplished facts, to the announcement 
of positive decisions taken by a majority of the citizens, 
which the government must interpret and obey. 

The question, therefore, whether our adoption of rep- 
resentative democracy was a mistake, raises the pre- 
liminary question whether the consent of the members 
of a community is a necessary condition of good 
government. To this question Plato, who among the 
political philosophers of the ancient world stood at a 
point of view nearest to that of a modem psychologist, 
unhesitatingly answered, No. To him it was incredible 
that any stable polity could be based upon the mere 
fleeting shadows of popular opinion. He proposed, 
therefore, in all seriousness, that the citizens of his 
Republic should live under the despotic government of 
those who by "slaving for it"^ had acquired a know- 
ledge of the reality which lay behind appearance. 
Comte, writing when modem science was beginning to 
feel its strength, made, in effect, the same proposal. 
Mr. H. G. Wells, in one of his sincere and courageous 
speculations, follows Plato. He describes a Utopia 
which is the result of the forcible overthrow of rep- 
resentative government by a voluntary aristocracy of 
trained men of science. He appeals, in a phrase con- 
sciously influenced by Plato's metaphysics, to "the idea 

^Republic, p. 494. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 217 

of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and 
illuminated men behind the shams and patriotisms, the 
spites and personalities of the ostensible world. . . ."^ 
There are some signs, in America as well as in England, 
that an increasing number of those thinkers who are 
both passionately in earnest in their desire for social 
change and disappointed in their experience of democ- 
racy, may, as an alternative to tlie cold-blooded manip- 
ulation of popular impulse and thought by professional 
politicians, turn "back to Plato"; and when once this 
question is started, neither our existing mental habits 
nor our loyalty to democratic tradition will prevent it 
from being fully discussed. 

To such a discussion we English, as tlie rulers of 
India, can bring an experiment in government without 
consent larger than any otlier that has ever been tried 
under the conditions of modem civilization. The 
Covenanted Civil Service of British India consists of a 
body of about a thousand trained men. They are 
selected under a system which ensures that practically 
all of tliem will not only possess exceptional mental 
force, but will also belong to a race, which, in spite of 
certain intellectual limitations, is strong in the special 

1 Wells, A Modern Utopia, p. 263. " I know of no case for the elec- 
tive Democratic government of modem States that cannot be knocked to 
pieces in five minutes. It is manifest that upon countless important pub- 
lic issues there is no collective wiU, and nothing in the mind of the aver- 
age man except blank indifference; that an electional system simply 
places power in the hands of the most skilful electioneers. . . ." Wells, 
Anticipations, p. 147. 



218 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

t 
I I 

faculty of government; and they are set to rule, under 
a system approaching despotism, a continent in which 
the most numerous races, in spite of their intellectual 
subtlety, have given little evidence of ability to govern. 

Our Indian experiment shows, however, that all men, 
however carefully selected and trained, must still in- 
habit "the ostensible world." The Anglo-Indian civil- 
ian during some of his working hours — when he is 
toiling at a scheme of irrigation, or forestry, or famine- 
prevention — may live in an atmosphere of impersonal 
science which is far removed from the jealousies and 
superstitions of the villagers in his district. But an 
absolute ruler is judged not merely by his efficiency 
in choosing political means, but also by that outlook 
on life which decides his choice of ends; and the Anglo- 
Indian outlook on life is conditioned, not by the prob- 
lem of British India as history will see it a thousand 
years hence, but by the facts of daily existence in the 
little government stations, with their trying climates, 
their narrow society, and the continual presence of an 
alien and possibly hostile race. We have not, it is true, 
yet followed the full rigour of Plato's system, and 
chosen the wives of Anglo-Indian officials by the same 
process as that through which their husbands pass. 
But it may be feared that even if we did so, the lady 
would still remain typical who said to Mr. Nevinson,"To 
us in India a pro-native is simply a rank outsider."^ 

What is even more important is the fact that, be- 
1 The Nation, December 21, 1907. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 219 

cause those whom the Anglo-Indian civilian governs are 
also living in the ostensible world, his choice of means 
on all questions involving popular opinion depends 
even more completely than if he were a party politician 
at home, not on things as they are, but on things as 
they can be made to seem. The avowed tactics of our 
empire in the East have therefore always been based 
by many of our high officials upon psychological and 
not upon logical considerations. We hold Durbars, 
and issue Proclamations, we blow men from guns, and 
insist stiffly on our own interpretation of our rights in 
dealing with neighbouring Powers, all with reference 
to "the moral effect upon the native mind." And, if 
half what is hinted at by some ultra-imperialist writers 
and talkers is true, racial and religious antipathy be- 
tween Hindus and Mohammedans is sometimes wel- 
comed, if not encouraged, by those who feel themselves 
bound at all costs to maintain our dominant position. 
The problem of the relation between reason and 
opinion is therefore one that would exist at least equally 
in Plato's corporate despotism as in the most complete 
democracy. Hume, in a penetrating passage in his essay 
on The First Principles of Government, says: "It is 
... on opinion only that government is founded; and 
this maxim extends to the most despotic and most mili- 
tary governments as well as to the most free and the 
most popular."^ It is when a Czar or a bureaucracy 
find themselves forced to govern in opposition to a 
1 Hume's Essays, chap. iv. 



220 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

vague national feeling, which may at any moment create 
an overwhelming national purpose, that the facts of 
man's sublogical nature are most ruthlessly exploited. 
The autocrat then becomes the most unscrupulous of 
demagogues, and stirs up racial, or religious, or social 
hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less scruple 
than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a 
democratic State. 

Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, 
and proposed that the loyalty of the subject-classes 
in his Republic should be secured once for all by re- 
ligious faith. His rulers were to establish and teach 
a religion in which they need not believe. They were 
to tell their people "one magnificent lie"; ^ a remedy 
which in its ultimate effect on the character of their 
rule might have been worse than the disease which it 
was intended to cure. 

But even if it is admitted that government without 
consent is a complicated and ugly process, it does not 
follow either that government by consent is always 
possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary repre- 
sentation is the only possible, or always the best possible, 
method of securing consent. 

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, 
and who is himself restrained by custom from mere 
tyranny, may at certain stages of culture be better than 
anything else which can be substituted for it. And 
representation, even when it is possible, is not an 

^ Republic, p. 414. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 221 

unchanging entity, but an expedient capable of an in- 
finite number of variations. In England at this mo- 
ment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to 
persons of the male sex above twenty-one years of 
age, who have occupied the same place of residence 
for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in 
constituencies based upon locality. But in all these 
respects, age, sex, qualification, and constituency, as 
well as in the political power given to the representa- 
tive, variation is possible. 

If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, 
trained not by Fenelon and Helvetius, but by the study 
of racial psychology, he could not use his genius and 
patience better than in the invention of constitutional 
expedients which should provide for a real degree of 
government by consent in those parts of the British 
Empire where men are capable of thinking for them- 
selves on political questions, but where the machinery 
of British parliamentary government would not work. 
In Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held 
in ordinary local constituencies only two per cent, of 
those entitled to vote go to the poll.^ As long as that 
is the case representative government is impossible. A 
slow process of education might increase the propor- 
tion of voters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible 
for men who understand the way in which Egyptians 
or Arabs think and feel to discover other methods by 
which the vague desires of the native population can be 

1 Times, January 6, 1908. 



222 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

ascertained, and the policy of the government made in 
some measure to depend on them. 

The need for invention is even more urgent in India, 
and that fact is apparently being realized by the Indian 
Government itself. The inventive range of Lord 
Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the 
moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation 
of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian 
conditions, and the organization of an "advisory Coun- 
cil of Notables"; ^ with the possible result that we may 
be advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in 
our dealings with the tillers of the soil, and by the 
factory owners of Bombay in our regulation of factory 
labour. 

In England itself, though great political inventions 
are always a glorious possibility, the changes in our 
political structure which will result from our new know- 
ledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed along lines 
laid down by slowly acting and already recognizable 
tendencies. 

A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in 
the United Kingdom during the last thirty or forty years, 
each of which had little conscious connection with the 
rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that govern- 
ment now tends to regulate, not only the process of 
ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the 
more complex process by which that decision is formed ; 

1 Mr. Morley in the House of Commons. Hansard, June 6, 1907, p. 
885. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 223 

and that this is done not in the interest of any partic- 
ular body of opinion, but from a belief in the general 
utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility 
of securing them by regulation. 

The nature of this change may perhaps be best under- 
stood by comparing it with the similar but earlier and 
far more complete change that has taken place in the 
conditions under which that decision is formed which 
is expressed in the verdict of a jury. Trial by jury 
was, in its origin, simply a method of ascertaining, 
from ordinary men whose veracity was securekl by 
religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.^ 
The various ways in which those opinions might have 
been formed were matters beyond the cognizance of the 
royal official who called the jury together, swore them, 
and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in England 
might therefore have developed on the same lines as it 
did in Athens, and have perished from the same causes. 
The number of the jury might have been increased, and 
the parties in the case might have hired advocates to write 
or deliver for them addresses containing distortions of 
fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in 
the "Private Orations" of Demosthenes. It might have 
become more important that the witnesses should burst 
into passionate weeping than that they should tell what 
they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by 
a show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenera- 
ting into a mob. If such an institution had lasted up 

1 See, e.g., Stephen, History of the Criminal Law, vol. i. pp. 260-72. 



224 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

» ————————— ^ — — ■» 

to our time, the newspapers would have taken sides in 
every important case. Each would have had its own 
version of the facts, the most telling points of which 
would have been reserved for the final edition on the 
eve of the verdict, and the fate of the prisoner or 
defendant would often have depended upon a strictly 
party vote. 

But in the English jury trial it has come to |be 
assumed, after a long series of imperceptible and for- 
gotten changes, that the opinion of the jurors, instead 
of being formed before the trial begins, should be 
formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that 
opmion is produced has been more and more completely 
controlled and developed, until it, and not the mere 
registration of the verdict, has become the essential 
feature of the trial. 

The jury are now separated from their fellow-men 
during the whole case. They are introduced into a 
world of new emotional values. The ritual of the court, 
the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest 
an environment in which the petty interests and im- 
pulses of ordinary life are unimportant when compared 
with the supreme worth of truth and justice. They 
are warned to empty their minds of all preconceived 
inferences and affections. The examination and cross- 
examination of the witnesses are carried on under rules 
of evidence which are the result of centuries of expe- 
rience, and which give many a man as he sits on a 
jury his first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 225 



and uncontrolled inferences of the human brain. The 
"said Fs," and "thought Fs," and "said he's," which 
are the material of his ordinary reasoning, are here 
banished on the ground that they are "not evidence," 
and witnesses are compelled to give a simple account 
of their remembered sensations of sight and hearing. 
The witnesses for the prosecution and the defence, 
if they are well-intentioned men, often find themselves 
giving, to their own surprise, perfectly consistent 
accounts of the events at issue. The barristers' tricks 
of advocacy are to some extent restrained by profes- 
sional custom and by the authority of the judge, and 
they are careful to point out to the jury each other's 
fallacies. Newspapers do not reach the jury box, and 
in any case are prevented by the law as to contempt 
of court from commenting on a case which is under 
trial. The judge sums up, carefully describing the 
conditions of valid inference on questions of disputed 
fact, and warning the jury against those forms of irra- 
tional and unconscious inference to which experience 
has shown them to be most liable. They then retire, 
all carrying in their minds the same body of simplified 
and dissected evidence, and all having been urged with 
every circumstance of solemnity to form their conclu- 
sions by the same mental process. It constantly happens 
therefore that twelve men, selected by lot, will come 
to a unanimous verdict as to a question on which in the 
outside world they would have been hopelessly divided, 
and that that verdict, which may depend upon questions 



226 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

of fact so difficult as to leave the practised intellect of 
the judge undecided, will very generally be right. An 
English law court is indeed during a well-governed 
jury trial a laboratory in which psychological rules of 
valid reasoning are illustrated by experiment ; and when, 
as threatens to occur in some American States and cities, 
it becomes impossible to enforce those rules, the jury 
system itself breaks down.^ 

At the same time, trial by jury is now used with a 
certain degree of economy, both because it is slow and 
expensive, and because men do not make good jurors 
if they are called upon too often. In order that popular 
consent may support criminal justice, and that the law 
may not be unfairly used to protect the interests or 
policy of a governing class or person, no man, in most 
civilized countries, may be sentenced to death or to a 
long period of imprisonment, except after the verdict 
of a jury. But the overwhelming majority of other 
judicial decisions are now taken by men selected not 
by lot, but, in theory at least, by special fitness for 
their task. 

In the light of this development of the jury trial we 
may now examine the tentative changes which, since 
the Reform Act of 1867, have been introduced into the 
law of elections in the United Kingdom. Long before 
that date, it had been admitted that the State ought 

1 On the jury system see Mr. Wells's Mankind in the Makings chapter 
vii. He suggests the use of juries in many administrative cases where it 
is desirable that government should be supported by popular consent. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 227 



not to stretch the principle of individual liberty so far 
as to remain wholly indifferent as to the kind of motives 
which candidates might bring to bear upon electors. 
It was obvious that if candidates were allowed to prac- 
tise open bribery the whole system of representation 
w^ould break down at once. Laws, therefore, against 
bribery had been for several generations on the statute 
books, and all that was required in that respect was the 
serious attempt, made after the scandals at the general 
election of 1880, to render them effective. But with- 
out entering into definite bargains with individual 
voters, a rich candidate can by lavish expenditure on 
his electoral campaign, both make himself personally 
popular, and create an impression that his connection 
wdth the constituency is good for trade. The Corrupt 
Practices Act of 1883 therefore fixed a maximum of 
expenditure for each candidate at a parliamentary elec- 
tion. By the same Act of 1883, and by earlier and later 
Acts, applying both to parliamentary and municipal 
elections, intimidation of all kinds, including the threat- 
ening of penalties after death, is forbidden. No badges 
or flags or bands of music may be paid for by, or on 
behalf of, a candidate. In order that political opinion 
may not be influenced by thoughts of the simpler bodily 
pleasures, no election meeting may be held in a build- 
ing where any form of food or drink is habitually sold, 
although that building may be only a Co-operative Hall 
with facilities for making tea in an ante-room. 

The existing laws against Corrupt Practices repre- 



228 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

sent, it is true, rather the growing purpose of the State 
to control the conditions under which electoral opinion 
is formed, than any large measure of success in carry- 
ing out that purpose. A rapidly increasing proportion 
of the expenditure at any English election is now in- 
curred by bodies enrolled outside the constituency, and 
nominally engaged, not in winning the election for a 
particular candidate, but in propagating their own 
principles. Sometimes the candidate whom they 
support, and whom they try to commit as deeply as 
possible, would be greatly relieved if they withdrew. 
Generally their agents are an integral part of his fight- 
ing organization, and often the whole of their expen- 
diture at an election is covered by a special subscription 
made by him to the central fund. Every one sees that 
this system drives a coach and horses through those 
clauses in the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict 
election expenses and forbid the employment of paid 
canvassers, though no one as yet has put forward any 
plan for preventing it. But it is acknowledged that 
unless the whole principle is to be abandoned, new 
legislation must take place; and Lord Robert Cecil talks 
of the probable necessity for a "stringent and far- 
reaching Corrupt Practices Act." ^ If, however, an act 
is carried stringent enough to deal effectually with the 
existing development of electoral tactics, it will have 
to be drafted on lines involving new and hitherto un- 

1 Times, June 26, 1907. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 229 

thought-of forms of interference with the liberty of 
political appeal. 

A hundred years ago a contested election might last 
in any constituency for three or four weeks of excite- 
ment and horseplay, during which the voters were every 
day further removed from the state of mind in which 
serious thought on the probable results of their votes 
was possible. Now no election may last more than 
one day, and we may soon enact that all the polling for 
a general election shall take place on the same day. 
The sporting fever of the weeks during which a general 
election even now lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures 
outside the newspaper ofi&ces, the flash-lights at night, 
and the cheering or groaning crowds in the party clubs, 
are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to 
effective political reasoning. 

A more difficult psychological problem arose in the 
discussion of the Ballot. Would a voter be more likely 
to form a thoughtful and public-spirited decision if, 
after it was formed, he voted publicly or secretly? 
Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy. 
Since men acted in accordance with their ideas of 
pleasure and pain, and since landlords and employers 
were able, in spite of any laws against intimidation, to 
bring "sinister" motives to bear upon voters whose 
votes were known, the advisability of secre^t voting 
seemed to follow as a corollary from utilitarianism. 
John Stuart Mill, however, whose whole philosophical 



230 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

i 

life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feeling 
against the utilitarian philosophy to which he gaVe 
nominal allegiance till the end, opposed the Ballot on 
grounds which really involved the abandonment of the 
whole utilitarian position. If ideas of pleasure and 
pain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives 
which can be summed up as the making or losing money, 
it is not true, said Mill, that even under a system of 
open voting such ideas are the main causes which induce 
the ordinary citizen to vote. "Once in a thousand 
times, as in the case of peace or war, or of taking 
off taxes, the thought may cross him that he shall save 
a few pounds or shillings in his year's expenditure 
if the side he votes for wins." He votes as a matter of 
fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. "His 
motive, when it is an honourable one, is the desire to 
do right. We will not term it patriotism or moral prin- 
ciple, in order not to ascribe to the voter's frame of mind 
a solemnity that does not belong to it." But ideas of 
right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened 
by the knowledge that we act under the eyes of our 
neighbours. "Since then the real motive which induces 
a man to vote honestly is for the most part not an 
interested motive in any form, but a social one, the 
point to be decided is whether the social feelings con- 
nected with an act and the sense of social duty in per- 
forming it, can be expected to be as powerful when the 
act is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for 
disinterested, nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 231 

But this question is answered as soon as stated. When 
in every other act of a man's life which concerns his 
duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily im- 
prove his conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member 
of parliament is the single case in which he will act 
better for being sheltered against all comment."^ 

Almost the whole civilized world has now adopted 
the secret Ballot; so that it would seem that Mill was 
wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, 
as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of 
average human motive was right. But Mill, though 
he soon ceased to be in the original sense of the word 
a utilitarian, always remained an intellectualist, and 
he made in the case of the Ballot the old mistake of 
giving too intellectual and logical an account of politi- 
cal impulses. It is true tliat men do not act politically 
upon a mere stock-exchange calculation of material 
advantages and disadvantages. They generally form 
vague ideas of right and wrong in accordance with 
vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results 
of political action. If an election w^ere like a jury 
trial, such inferences might be formed by a process 
which would leave a sense of fundamental conviction 
in the mind of the thinker, and might be expressed 
under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to 
which publicity would lend an added weight, as it 

1 Letter to the Reader, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J. S. M., quoted as Mill's 
by Henry Romilly in pamphlet, Public Responsibility and Vote by Bal- 
lot, pp. 89, 90. 



232 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



does in those "acts of a man's life which concern his 
duty to others," to which Mill refers — ^the paying of a 
debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treat- 
ment of one's relatives. But under existing electoral 
conditions, trains of thought, formed as they often are 
by the half-conscious suggestion of newspapers or 
leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense. 
Apart from direct intimidation, the voice of the 
canvasser, the excitement of one's friends, the look of 
triumph on the face of one's opponents, or the vague 
indications of disapproval by the rulers of one's village, 
are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertain 
conclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the 
ultimate vote secret, gives therefore thought its best 
chance, and at least requires the canvasser to produce in 
the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall be 
genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation 
of momentary impulse a promise which is shamefacedly 
carried out in public because it is a promise. 

Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of 
the personal disciples of Mill, and at present he is de- 
voting himself to a campaign in favor of "proportional 
representation," in which, as it seems to me, the old in- 
tellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. 
He proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under 
the existing system of the "single ballot" a minority in 
any single-member constituency may, if there are more 
candidates than two, return its representative, and 
secondly, that certain citizens who think for themselves 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 233 



instead of allowing party leaders to think for them — the 
Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church 
Liberals — have, as a rule, no candidate representing 
their own opinions for whom they can vote. He pro- 
poses, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of 
■^reference a ballot paper containing lists of candidate? 
for large constituences each of which returns six or seven 
members, Manchester with eight seats being given 
as an example. 

This system, according to Lord Courtney, "will lead 
to the dropping of the fetters which now interfere with 
free thought, and will set men and women on their feet, 
erect, intelligent, independent."^ But the arguments 
used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal 
defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion 
is ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion 
is created. If at the assizes all the jurors summoned 
were collected into one large jury, and if they all voted 
Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a trial in 
which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses 
were examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no 
longer depend on the accidental composition of the 
separate juries; but the process of forming verdicts 
would be made, to a serious degree, less effective. 

The English experiment on which the Proportional 
Representation Society mainly relies is an imaginery 
election, held in November 1906 by means of ballot 

1 Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics Institute, 
Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6. 



234 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

papers distributed through members and friends of the 
society and through eight newspapers. "The consti- 
tuency," we are told, "was supposed to return five mem- 
bers ; the candidates, twelve in number, were politicians 
whose names might be expected to be known to the 
ordinary newspaper reader, and who might be con- 
sidered as representative of some of the main divisions 
of public opinion."^ The names were, in fact, Sir A. 
Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Thomas 
P. Whittaker, and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Rich- 
ard Bell, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Hal- 
dane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law, and 
Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected. 

I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot 
papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party. 
No discussion of the various candidates took place, 
with the single exception that, finding my memory of 
Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a ques- 
tion about him to my next neighbor. We were all poli- 
ticians, and nearly all the names were those of persons 
belonging to that small group of forty or fifty whose 
faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect 
their readers to recognise. 

At our dinner party not much unreality was intro- 
duced by the intellectualist assumption that the names on 
the list were, as a Greek might have said, the same, "to 
us," as they were "in themselves." But an ordinary 
list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter 

1 Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 235 

is "to him" simply a piece of paper with black marks on 
it. with which he will either do nothing or do as he is 
told. 

The Proportional Representation Society seem to 
assume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be 
carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the 
names and party programs but the reasons for the 
selection of a particular person as candidate and for all 
the items in his program will be known to the "ordi- 
nary newspaper reader," who is assumed to be identical 
witli the ordinary citizen. But even if one neglects the 
political danger arising from the modem concentration 
of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who 
may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it 
is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read 
a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the 
propaganda of a small political group. Men read news- 
papers for news, and, since the collection of news is enor- 
mously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between 
them a small number of established papers advocating 
broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate 
during a general election, only refer to those particular 
contests in which the party leaders are not concerned as 
matters of casual information, until, on the day of the 
poll, they issue general directions "How to vote." The 
choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local 
party organizations, and if any real knowledge of the 
personality of a candidate or of the details of his pro- 
gram is to be made part of the consciousness of the 



236 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

ordinary voter, this must still be done by local elec- 
tioneering in each constituency, f.e. by meetings and 
canvassing and the distribution of "election literature." 
Lord Courtney's proposal, even if it only multiplied 
the size of the ordinary constituency by six, would mul- 
tiply by at least six the difficulty of effective election- 
eering, and even if each candidate were prepared to 
spend six times as much money at every contest, he 
could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the 
number of meetings which he could address in a day. 

These considerations were brought home to me by 
my experience of the nearest approximation to Propor- 
tional Representation which has ever been actually 
adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Caven- 
dish induced the House of Commons to adopt "plural 
voting" for School Board elections. I fought in three 
London School Board elections as a candidate and in 
two others as a political worker. In London the legal 
arrangement was that each voter in eleven large dis- 
tricts should be given about five or six votes, and that 
the same number of seats should be assigned to the dis- 
trict. In the provinces a town or parish was given a 
number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 
"plump" all his votes on one candidate, or might dis- 
tribute them as he liked among any of them. 

This left the local organizers both in London and the 
country with two alternatives. They might form the 
list of party candidates in each district into a recog- 
nizable entity like the American "ticket" and urge all 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 237 



voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Con- 
servative "eight" or "five" or "three." If they did this 
they were saved the trouble involved in any serious 
attempt to instruct voters as to the individual person- 
alities of the members of the list. Or they might prac- 
tically repeal the plural voting law, split up the con- 
stituency by a voluntary arrangement into single mem- 
ber sections, and spend the weeks of the election in 
making one candidate for each party known in each 
section. The first method was generally adopted in the 
provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a 
party point of view of the French scrutin de liste. The 
second method was adopted in London, and perhaps 
tended to make the London elections turn more than they 
otherwise would have done upon the qualities of indi- 
vidual candidates. ^Tiichever system was adopted by 
the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the 
voters, with the exception of the well- organized Roman 
Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and 
of those who plumped for representatives of the special 
interests of the teachers or school-keepers. 

If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parlia- 
mentary elections, it is the "ticket" system which, owing 
to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used. 
Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed 
copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 
2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party associa- 
tion, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked 
official paper. The essential fact, that is to say, on 



238 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

which party tactics would depend under Lord Court- 
ney's scheme is not that the votes would finally be added 
up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be 
required to arrange in order more names than there is 
time during the election to turn for him into real persons. 
Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of 
his Municipal Representation Bill in the House of 
Lords, ^ contrasted his proposed system with that used 
in the London Borough Council elections, according to 
which a number of seats are assigned to each ward, and 
the voter m/ay give one vote each, without indication of 
preference, to that number of candidates. It is true that 
the electoral machinery for the London Boroughs is the 
worst to be found anywhere in the world outside of 
America. I have before me my party ballot-card in- 
structing me how to vote at the last Council election in 
my present borough. There were six seats to be filled 
in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I was 
told by my party organization, giving one vote each to 
six names, not one of which I remembered to have seen 
before. If there had been one seat to be filled, and 
say, three candidates, I should have found out enough 
about one candidate at least to give a more or less inde- 
pendent vote ; and the local party committees would have 
known that I and others would do so. Each party would 
then have circulated a portrait and a printed account of 
their candidate and of his principles, and would have 
had a strong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputa- 

1 AprU 30, 1907. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 239 



ble person. But I could not give the time necessary 
for forming a real opinion on fifteen candidates, who 
volunteered no information about themselves. I there- 
fore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of 
those who voted in the borough, voted a "straight ticket." 
If for any reason the party committee put, to use an 
Americanism, a "yellow dog" among the list of names, 
I voted for the yellow dog. 

Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to 
vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of know- 
ledge, but should have copied down different marks 
from my party card. On the assumption, that is to 
say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents 
an individual known to every voter there would be an 
enormous difference between Lord Courtney's proposed 
system and the existing system in the London Boroughs. 
But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere 
names, there is little effective difference between the 
working of the two systems until the votes are counted. 

If the sole object of an election were to discover and 
record the exact proportion of the electorate who are 
prepared to vote for candidates nominated by the sev- 
eral party organizations Lord Courtney's scheme might 
be adopted as a whole. But English experience, and a 
longer experience in America, has shown that the per- 
sonality of the candidate nominated is at least as impor- 
tant as his party allegiance, and that a parliament of well- 
selected members who represent somewhat roughly the 
opinions of the nation is better than a parliament of ill- 



240 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

selected members who, as far as their party labels are 
concerned, are, to quote Lord Courtney, "a distillation, 
a quintessence, a microcosm, a reflection of the com- 
munity."^ 

To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, 
which permits of a wide choice, and the preferential 
vote, which permits of full use of that choice, are equally 
essential parts of his plan; and that plan will soon be 
seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise 
of the Labour Party and the late prevalence of "three- 
cornered" contests, will soon have to deal with the ques- 
tion. It will then be interesting to see whether the grow- 
ing substitution of the new quantitative and psycholog- 
ical for the old absolute and logical way of thinking 
about elections will have advanced sufficiently far to 
enable the House of Commons to distinguish between the 
two points. If so, they will adopt the transferable 
vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-cornered elec- 
tions, while retaining single-member constituencies, and 
therewith the possibility of making the personality of a 
candidate known to the whole of his constituents. 

A further efl^ect of the way in which we are begin- 
ning to think of the electoral process is that, since 
1888, parliament, in reconstructing the system of English 
local government, has steadily diminished the numbei 
of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their 
efficiency. The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 
1894 swept away thousands of elections for Improve- 

1 Address at Stockport, p. 11. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 241 



ment Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902 the 
separately elected School Boards were abolished, and 
it is certain that the Guardians of the Poor will soon 
follow them. The Rural Parish Councils, which were 
created in 1894, and which represented a reversion by the 
Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, 
have been a failure, and will either be abolished or will 
remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers 
will be given to them. But if we omit the rural dis- 
tricts, the inhabitant of a "county borough" will soon 
vote only for parliament and his borough council, while 
the inhabitant of London or of an urban district or non- 
county borough will only vote for parliament, his county, 
and his district or borough council. On the average, 
neither will be asked to vote more than once a year. 

In America one notices a similiar tendency towards 
electoral concentration as a means of increasing elec- 
toral responsibility. In Philadelphia I found that this 
concentration had taken a form which seemed to me to 
be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake in 
psychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had 
thought only of economizing political force, and had 
ignored the limitations of political knowledge, so many 
elections were combined on one day that the Philadel- 
phia "blanket-ballot" which I was shown, with its paral- 
lel columns of party "tickets," containing some four 
hundred names. The resulting effects on the personnel 
of Philadelphian politics were as obvious as they were 
lamentable. In other American cities, however, con- 



242 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

centration often takes the form of the abolition of many 
of the elected boards and officials, and the substitution 
for them of a single elected Mayor, who administers the 
city by nominated commissions, and whose personality 
it is hoped can be made known during an election to all 
the voters, and therefore must be seriously considered 
by his nominators. 

One noticed again the growing tendency to substitute 
a quantitative and psychological for an absolute and 
logical view of the electoral process in the House of 
Commons debate on the claim set up by the House of 
Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general elec- 
tion (or a referendum) at any moment which they 
thought advantageous to themselves. Mr. Herbert 
Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if allowed, 
would give a still further advantage in politics to the 
electoral forces of wealth, acting, at dates carefully 
chosen by the House of Lords, both directly and through 
the control of the Press. Lord Robert Cecil alone, 
whose mind is historical in the worst sense of that 
term, objected "What a commentary was that on the 
'will of the people' " ^ and thought it somehow illegit- 
imate that Mr. Samuel should not defend democracy 
according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so that he 
could answer in the style of Canning. The present quar- 
rel between the two Houses may indeed result in a fur- 
ther step in the public control of the methods of pro- 
ducing political opinion by the substitution of 

1 Times, June 25, 1907. 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 243 

General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our 
present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments 
of national excitement. 

But in the electoral process, as in so many other 
cases, one dares not hope that these slow and half- 
conscious changes in the general intellectual attitude 
will be sufficient to suggest and carry through all the 
improvements of machinery necessary to meet out 
growing difficulties, unless they are quickened by a 
conscious purpose. At my last contest for the London 
County Council I had to spend the half hour before 
the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of 
a very poor district. I w^as watching the proceedings, 
which in the crush at the end are apt to be rather 
irregular, and at the same time was thinking of this 
book. The voters who came in were the result of the 
"final rally" of the canvassers on both sides. They 
entered the room in rapid but irregular succession, 
as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and 
inefficient machine. About half of them were women, 
with broken straw hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. 
All were dazed and bewildered, having been snatched 
away in carriages or motors from the making of match- 
boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the 
public house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from 
bed. Most of them seemed to be trying, in the 
unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for 
which, as they had been reminded at the door, they 
were to vote. A few were drunk, and one man, who 



244 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ 

was apparently a supporter of my own, clung to my 
neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely 
tremendous fact which just eluded his power of 
speech. I was very anxious to win, and inclined to 
think I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense 
conviction that this could not be accepted as even a 
decently satisfactory method of creating a government 
for a city of five million inhabitants, and that nothing 
short of a conscious and resolute facing of the whole 
problem of the formation of political opinion would en- 
able us to improve it. 

Something might be done, and perhaps will be done 
in the near future, to abolish the more sordid details 
of English electioneering. Public houses could be 
closed on the election day, both to prevent drunken- 
ness and casual treating, and to create an atmosphere 
of comparative seriousness. It is a pity that we cannot 
have the elections on a Sunday as they have in France. 
The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or 
twenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would 
have some power of asserting themselves even in 
the presence of the canvasser, whose hustling energy 
now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who 
have just finished their day's work. The feeling 
of moral responsibility half consciously associated with 
the religious use of Sunday would also be so valuable 
an aid to reflection that the most determined anti- 
clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it 
would add to the political power of the churches. It 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 245 

may cease to be true that in England the Christian 
day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the 
founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about 
by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available 
for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might 
again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of 
the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings 
were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy 
schoolrooms now used. But such improvements in the 
external environment of election day, however desir- 
able they may be in themselves, can only be of small 
effect. 

Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in 
the working of the electoral process will disappear of 
themselves as men approach to social equality. Those 
who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive 
for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity 
of money to spend on it; while the women and 
the working men who are now unenfranchised or 
[politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh 
stream of unspoilt impulse. 

If our civilization is to survive, greater social equality 
must indeed come. Men will not continue to live 
peacefully together in huge cities under conditions 
that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among 
those who profit, and those who suffer by them. But 
no one who is near to political facts can believe that 
the immediate effect either of greater equality or of 
the extension of the suffrage will be to clear away 



246 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organ- 
ization. 

A mere numerical increase in the number of persons 
in England who are interested in politics would indeed 
itself introduce a new and difficult political factor. 
The active politicians in England, those who take 
any part in politics beyond voting, are at present a 
tiny minority. I was to speak not long ago at an 
election meeting, and having been misdirected as to 
the place where the meeting was to be held, found my- 
self in an unknown part of North London, compelled 
to inquire of the inhabitants until I should find the 
address either of the meeting-hall or of the party com- 
mittee-room. For a long time I drew blank, but at 
last a cabman on his way home to tea told me that 
there was a milkman in his street who was "a politician 
and would know." There are in London seven hundred 
thousand parliamentary voters, and I am informed by 
the man who is in the best position to know that it 
would be safe to say that less than ten thousand per- 
sons actually attend the annual ward meetings of the 
various parties, and that not more than thirty 
thousand are members of the party associations. That 
division of labour which assigns politics to a special 
class of enthusiasts, looked on by many of their neigh- 
bours as well-meaning busybodies, is not carried so far 
in most other parts of England as in London, 
But in no county in England, as far as I am aware, 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 247 



does the number of persons really active in politics 
amount to ten per cent, of the electorate. 

There are, I think, signs that this may soon cease to 
be true. The English Elementary Education Act was 
passed in 1870, and the elementary schools may be said 
to have become fairly efficient by 1880. Those who 
entered them, being six years old, at that date are 
now aged thirty-four. The statistics as to the pro- 
duction and sale of newspapers and cheap books and 
the use of free libraries, show that the younger work- 
ing men and women in England read many times 
as much as their parents did. This, and the general 
increase of intellectual activity in our cities of which 
it is only a part, may very probably lead, as the social 
question in politics grows more serious, to a large 
extension of electoral interest. If so, the little groups 
of men and women who now manage the three English 
parties in the local constituencies will find themselves 
swamped by thousands of adherents who will insist on 
taking some part in the choice of candidates and the 
formation of programs. That will lead to a great 
increase in the complexity of the process by which the 
Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local 
party association are appointed. Parliament indeed 
may find itself compelled, as many of the American 
States have been compelled, to pass a series of Acts for 
the prevention of fraud in the interior government of 
parties. The ordinary citizen would find then, much 



248 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

more obviously than he does at present, that an effective 
use of his voting power involves not only the marking 
of a ballot paper on the day of the election, but an 
active share in that work of appointing and controlling 
party committtees from which many men whose 
opinions are valuable to the State shrink with an 
instinctive dread. 

But the most important difficulties raised by the 
extension of political interest from a very small to a 
large fraction of the population would be concerned with 
political motive rather than political machinery. 
It is astonishing that the early English democrats, who 
supposed that individual advantage would be the sole 
driving force in politics, assumed, without realizing the 
nature of their own assumption, that the representative, 
if he were elected for a short term, would inevitably 
feel his own advantage to be identical with that of the 
community.^ At present there is a fairly sufficient 
supply of men whose imagination and sympathies are 
sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready to 
undertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and 
adminstration for the general good. But every 
organizer of elections knows that the supply is never 
more than sufficient, and payment of members, while 
it would permit men of good-will to come forward who 

1 E.g., James Mill, Essay on Government (1825), "We have seen in 
what manner it is. possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise of 
an interest different from that of the parties who choose them, namely, 
by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties" 
(p. 27). 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 249 

are now shut out, would also make it possible for less 
worthy motives to become more effective. The con- 
centration both of administrative and legislative work 
in the hands of the Cabinet, while it tends to economy 
of time and effort, is making the House of Commons 
yearly a less interesting place; and members have of 
late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the 
personnel of tlie House should seriously deteriorate. 

The chief immediate danger in the case of the two 
older parties is that, owing to the growing expense of 
electioneering and the growing effect of legislation on 
commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the 
members and candidates may be dra"wn from the class 
of "hustling" company-promoters and financiers. The 
Labour Party, on the other hand, can now draw upon 
an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its 
difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calcu- 
lated individual selfishness, but from the social and 
intellectual environment of working-class life. During 
the last twenty years I have been associated, for some 
years continuously and aftenvards at intervals, with 
English political working men. They had, it seemed 
to me, for the most part a great advantage in the fact 
that certain real things of life were real to tliem. It 
ds, for instance, the "class-conscious" working men 
who, in England as on the Continent, are the chief 
safeguard against the horrors of a general European 
war. But as their number and responsibility increase 
they will, I believe, have to learn some rather hard 



250 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

lessons as to the intellectual conditions of represent- 
ative government upon a large scale. The town work- 
ing man lives in a world in which it is very dif- 
ficult for him to choose his associates. If he is of 
an expansive temperament, and it is such men who 
become politicians, he must take his mates in the 
shop and his neighbours in the tenement house as he 
finds them — and he sees them at very close range. 
The social virtue therefore which is almost a necessity 
of his existence is a good-humoured tolerance of the 
defects of average human nature. He is keenly aware 
of the uncertainty of his own industrial position, 
accustomed to give and receive help, and very unwill- 
ing to "do" any man "out of his job." His parents and 
grandparents read very little and he was brought up 
in a home with few books. If, as he grows up, he 
does not himself read, things beyond his direct obser- 
vation are apt to be rather shadowy for him, and he 
is easily made suspicious of that which he does not 
understand. If, on the other hand, he takes to reading 
when he is already a grown man, words and ideas are 
apt to have for him a kind of abstract and sharply 
outlined reality in a region far removed from his daily 
life. 

Now the first virtue required in government is the 
habit of realizing that things whose existence we infer 
from reading are as important as the things observed 
by our senses, of looking, for instance, through a list 
of candidates for an appointment and weighing the 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 251 

qualifications of the man whom one has never met by 
the same standard as those of the man whom one has 
met, and liked or pitied, the day before; or of deciding 
on an improvement wdth complete impartiality as 
between the district one knows of only on the map and 
the district one sees every morning. If a representative 
elected to govern a large area allows personal acquaint- 
ance and liking to influence his decisions, his acquaint- 
ance and liking wdll be schemed for and exploited 
by those w^ho have their o^vn ends to gain. The 
same difficulty arises in matters of discipline, w^iere 
the interests of the unknown thousands who will 
suffer from the inefficiency of an official have to be 
balanced against those of the known official who will 
suffer by being punished or dismissed; as well as in those 
numerous cases in whiqh a working man has to balance 
the dimly realized interests of the general consumer 
against his intimate sympathy with his fellow-craftsmen. 
The political risk arising from these facts is not, at 
present, very great in the parliamentar}- Labour Party. 
The working men who have been sent to parliament have 
been hitherto, as a rule, men of picked intelligence and 
morale and of considerable political experience. But 
the success or failure of any scheme aiming at social 
equity will depend chiefly on its administration by local 
bodies, to which the working classes must necessarily 
send men of less exceptional ability and experience. I 
have never myself sen^d on an elected local body the 
majority of whose members w^ere weekly wage earners. 



252 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

But I have talked with men, both of working-class and 
middle-class origin, who have been in that position. 
What they say confirms that which I have inferred from 
my own observation, that on such a body one finds a 
high level of enthusiasm, of sympathy, and of readiness 
to work, combined with a difficulty in maintaining a 
sufficiently rigorous standard in dealing with sectional 
interests and official discipline. 

One is told that on such a body many members feel 
it difficult to realize that the way in which a well inten- 
tioned man may deal with his own personal expenditure, 
his continued patronage, for instance, of a rather in- 
efficient tradesman because he has a large family, or, 
his refusal to contest an account from a dislike of imput- 
ing bad motives, is fatal if applied in the expenditure 
of the large sums entrusted to a public body. Some- 
times there are even, one learns, indications of that good- 
humoured and not ill-meant laxity in expending public 
money which has had such disastrous results in America, 
and which lends itself so easily to exploitation by those 
in whom the habit of giving and taking personal favours 
has hardened into systematic fraud. When one of the 
West Ham Guardians, two years ago, committed suicide 
on being charged with corruption, the Star sent down a 
representative who filled a column with the news. "His 
death," we are told, "has robbed the district of an 
indefatigable public worker. County Council, Board 
of Guardians, and Liberal interests all occupied his 
leisure time." "One of his friends" is described as 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT 253 

saying to the Star reporter, "You do not need to go far 
to learn of his big-souled geniality. The poor folks of 
the workhouse will miss him badly"^ When one has 
waded through masses of evidence on American muni- 
cipal corruption, that phrase about "big-souled geni- 
ality" makes one shudder. 

The early history of the co-operative and trade-union 
movements in England is full of pathetic instances of 
this kind of failure, and both movements show how a 
new and more stringent ideal may be slowly built up. 
Such an ideal will not come of itself without an effort, 
and must be part of the conscious organized thought of 
each generation if it is to be permanently effective. 

These difficulties have in the past been mainly pointed 
out by the opponents of democracy. But if democracy 
is to succeed they must be frankly considered by the 
democrats themselves; just as it is the engineer who is 
trying to build the bridge, and not the ferry-owner, who 
is against any bridge at all, whose duty it is to calculate 
the strain which the materials will stand. The engineer, 
when he wishes to increase the margin of safety in his 
plans, treats as factors in the same quantitative problem 
both the chemical expedients by which he can strengthen 
his materials and the structural changes by which the 
strain on those materials can be diminished. So those 
who would increase the margin of safety in our dem- 
ocracy must estimate, with no desire except to arrive 
at truth, both the degree to which the political strength 
1 Star, November 28, 1906. 



254 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

of the individual citizen can, in any given time, be 
actually increased by moral and educational changes, 
and the possibility of preserving or extending or invent- 
ing such elements in the structure of democracy as may 
prevent the demand upon him being too great for his 
strength. 



CHAPTER III 

OFFICIAL THOUGHT 

It is obvious, however, that the persons elected under 
any conceivable system of representation cannot do the 
whole work of government themselves. 

If all elections are held in single member constitu- 
encies of a size sufficient to secure a good supply of 
candidates ; if the number of elections is such as to allow 
the political workers a proper interval for rest and 
reflection between the campaigns; if each elected body 
has an area large enough for eff'ective administration, 
a number of members sufficient for committee work and 
not too large for debate, and duties sufficiently important 
to justify the effort and expense of a contest; then 
one may take about twenty-three thousand as the best 
number of men and women to be elected by the existing 
population of the United Kingdom — or rather less than 
one to every two thousand of the population/ 

This proportion depends mainly on facts in the 

1 I arrive at this figure by dividing the United Kingdom into single 
member parliamentary constituencies, averaging 100,000 in population, 
which gives a House of Commons of 440 — a more convenient number than 
the existing 670. I take the same unit of 100,000 for the average munici- 
pal area. Large towns would contain several parliamentary constituen- 
cies, and small towns would, as at present, be separate municipal areas, 
although only part of a parliamentary constituency. I allow one local 
council of 50 on the average to each municipal area. 

255 



256 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

psychology of the electors, which will change very slowly 
if they change at all. At present the amount of work 
to be done in the way of government is rapidly increas- 
ing, and seems likely to continue to increase. If so, 
the number of elected persons available for each unit 
of work must tend to decrease. The number of persons 
now elected in the United Kingdom (including, for 
instance, the Parish Councillors of rural parishes, and 
the Common Council of the City of London) is, of course, 
larger than my estimate, though it has been greatly 
diminished by the Acts of 1888, 1894, and 1902. 
Owing, however, to the fact that areas and powers are 
still somewhat uneconomically distributed it represents 
a smaller actual working power than would be given 
by the plan which I suggest. 

On the other hand, the number of persons (excluding 
the Army and Navy) given in the Census Returns of 
1901 as professionally employed in the central and local 
government of the United Kingdom was 161,000. This 
number has certainly grown since 1901 at an increasing 
rate, and consists of persons who give on an average at 
least four times as many hours a week to their work 
as can be expected from the average elected member. 

What ought to be the relation between these two bodies, 
of twenty-three thousand elected, and say, two hundred 
thousand non-elected persons? To begin with, ought 
the elected members to be free to appoint the non-elected 
officials as they like? Most American politicians of 
Andrew Jackson's time, and a large number of American 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 257 



politicians to-day, would hold, for instance, as a direct 
corollary from democratic principles, that the elected 
congressman or senator for a district or State has a 
right to nominate the local federal officials. There 
may, he would admit, be some risk in that method, 
but the risk, he would argue, is one involved in the whole 
scheme of democracy, and the advantages of democracy 
as a whole are greater than its disadvantages. 

Our political logic in England has never been so 
elementary as that of the Americans, nor has our faith 
in it been so unflinching. Most Englishmen, therefore, 
have no feeling of disloyalty to the democratic idea in 
admitting that it is not safe to allow the efficiency of 
officials to depend upon the personal character of 
individual representatives. At the Ger^eral Election 
of 1906 there were at least two English con- 
stituencies (one Liberal and the other Conservative) 
which returned candidates whose personal unfitness had 
been to most men's minds proved by evidence given in 
the law courts. Neither con^ituency was markedly 
unlike the average in any respect. The facts were well 
known, and in each case an attempt was made by a few 
public-spirited voters to split the party vote, but both 
candidates were successful by large majorities. The 
Borough of Croydon stands, socially and intellectually, 
well above the average, but Mr. Jabez Balfour repres- 
ented Croydon for many years, until he was sentenced 
to penal servitude for fraud. No one in any of these 
three cases would have desired that the sitting member 



258 HUMAN NA*rilRE I§ POLITICS 

* <• ' • ■ 

should appoint, say, the postmasters, or collectors of 
Inland Revenue fot his constituency. ^\ 

But though the* .case ' against the appointment of 
officials by individual Representatives is clear, the 
question of the part which should be taken by any elected 
body as. a whole in appointing the officials who serve 
under it is much more -difficult, and cannot be discussed 
without considering what are to be the relative functions 
of the officials and the representatives after the appoint- 
ment has taken place. Do we aim at making election 
in fact as well as in constitutional theory the sole base 
of political authority, or do we desire that the non-elected 
officials shall exert some amount of independent 
influence? 

The fact that most Englishmen, in spite of their 
traditional fear of bureaucracy, would now accept the 
second of these alternatives, is one of the most striking 
results of our experience in the working of democracy. 
We see that the evidence on which the verdict at an 
election must be given is becoming every year more 
difficult to collect and present, and further removed from 
the direct observation of the voters. We are afraid of 
being entirely dependent on partisan newspapers or 
election leaflets for our knowledge, and we have there- 
fore come to value, even if for that reason only, the 
existence of a responsible and more or less independent 
Civil Service. It is difficult to realize how short a time 
it is since questions for which we now rely entirely on 
official statistics were discussed by the ordinary political 



OFFICIAL tH*OUGHT 259 

t m 

_ ^ ^ __^__^^_^^____^___ 

methods of agitation and 'advocacyi In the earlier 
years of George the Third's reign, 'at a time when pop- 
ulation in England was, as we now know, rising with 
, unprecedented rapidity, th^ question of fact whether 
it was rising or falling led to embittered political con- 
troversy.^ In the spring of 1830 the House of Commons 
gave three nights to a confused party debate on the state 
of the country. The Whigs argued that distress was 
general, and the Tories (who were, as it happened, right) 
that it was local.' In 1798 or 1830 the ''public" who 
could take part in such discussions numbered perhaps 
fifty thousand at the most. At least ten million people 
must, since 1903, have taken part in the present Tariff 
Reform controversy; and that controversy would have 
degenerated into mere Bedlam if it had not been for 
the existence of the Board of Trade Returns, with whose 
fibres both sides had at least to appear to square their 
arsfumentf,. 

If official figures did not exist in England, or if they 
did not possess or deserve authority, it is difficult to 
estimate the degree of political harm which could be 
done in a few years by an interested and deliberately 
dishonest agitation on some question too technical for 
the personal judgment of the ordinary voter. Suppose, 
for instance, that our Civil Service were either notori- 
ously inefficient or believed to be dominated by party 
influence, and that an organized and fraudulent "cur- 

1 Bonar's Malthus, chap. vii. 

2 Hansard, Feb. 4, 5, 6, 1830. 



260 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

rency agitation" should suddenly spring up. A power- 
ful press syndicate brings out a series of well-advertised 
articles declaring that the privileges of the Bank of 
England and the law as to the gold reserve are "stran- 
gling British Industry." The contents bills of fifty 
newspapers denounce every day the "monopolists" and 
the "gold-bugs," the "lies and shams" of the Bank 
Returns, and the "paid perjurers of Somerset House." 
The group of financiers who control the syndicate stand 
to win enormous sums by the creation of a more "elastic" 
currency, and subscribe largely to a Free Money League 
which includes a few sincere paper-money theorists who 
have been soured by the contempt of the professional 
economists. A vigorous and well-known member of 
parliament — a not very reputable aristocrat perhaps, 
or some one loosely connected with the Labor movement 
— whom everybody has hitherto feared and no one quite 
trusted, sees his opportunity. He puts himself at the 
head of the movement, denounces the "fossils" and 
"superior persons" who at present lead Conservative 
and Liberal and Labour parties alike, and, with the help 
of the press syndicate and the subscription fund of the 
"Free Money League," begins to capture the local assoc- 
iations, and through them the central office of the party 
which is for the moment in opposition. 

Can any one be sure that such a campaign, if it were 
opposed only by counter-electioneering, might not suc- 
ceed, even although its proposals were wholly fraudulent, 
and its leaders so ignorant or so criminal that they could 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 261 

only come into power by discrediting two-thirds of the 
honest politicians in the country, and by replacing them 
with "hustlers" and "boodlers" and "grafters," and the 
other species for whom American political science has 
provided names? How is the ordinary voter — a market- 
gardener, or a gas-stoker, or a water-colour painter — ^to 
distinguish by the help of his own knowledge and 
reasoning power between the various appeals made to 
him by the "Reformers" and the "Safe Money Men" as 
to the right proportion of the gold reserve to the note 
issue — the "ten per cent." on the blue posters and the 
"cent, per cent." on the yellow? Nor will his conscience 
be a safer guide than his judgment. A "Christian 
Service Wing" of the Free Money League may be 
formed, and his conscience may be roused by a white- 
cravatted orator intoxicated by his own eloquence into 
something like sincerity, who borrows that phrase about 
"Humanity crucified upon a cross of gold" which Mr. 
W. J. Bryan borrowed a dozen years ago from some one 
else. In an optimistic mood one might rely on the subtle 
network of confidence by which each man trusts, on sub- 
jects outside his own knowledge, some honest and better- 
informed neighbour, who again trusts at several removes 
the trained thinker. But does such a personal network 
exist in our vast delocalized urban populations? 

It is the vague apprehension of such dangers, quite 
as much as the merely selfish fears of the privileged 
classes, which preserves in Europe the relics of past 
systems of non-elective government, the House of Lords, 



262 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

for instance, in England, and the Monarchy in Italy 
or Norway. Men feel that a second base in politics 
is required, consisting of persons independent of the 
tactics by which electoral opinion is formed and legally 
entitled to make themselves heard. But political 
authority founded on heredity or wealth is not in fact 
protected from the interested manipulation of opinion 
and feeling. The American Senate, which has come to 
be representative of wealth, is already absorbed by that 
financial power which depends for its existence on 
manufactured opinion; and our House of Lords is 
rapidly tending in the same direction. From the 
beginning of history it has been found easier for any 
skilled politician who set his mind to it, to control the 
opinions of a hereditary monarch than those of a 
crowd. 

The real "Second Chamber," the real "constitutional 
check" in England, is provided, not by the House of 
Lords or the Monarchy, but by the existence of a per- 
manent Civil Service, appointed on a system indepen- 
dent of the opinion or desires of any politician, and 
holding office during good behaviour. If such a service 
were, as it is in Russia and to a large extent in India, 
a sovereign power, it would itself, as I argued in the 
last chapter, have to cultivate the art of manipulating 
opinion. But the English Civil servants in their pre- 
sent position have the right and duty of making their 
voice heard, without the necessity of making their will, 
by fair means or foul, prevail. 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 263 



The creation of this Service was the one great 
political invention in nineteenth-century England, and 
like other inventions it was worked out under the pres- 
sure of an urgent practical problem. The method of 
appointing the officials of the East India Company had 
been a critical question in English politics since 1783. 
By that time it had already become clear that we could 
not permanently allow the appointment of the rulers 
of a great empire kept in existence by the English fleet 
and army to depend upon the irresponsible favour of 
the Company's directors. Charles James Fox in 1783, 
with his usual heedlessness, proposed to cut the knot by 
making Indian appointments, in effect, part of the 
ordinary system of parliamentary patronage; and he 
and Lord North were beaten over their India Bill, not 
only because George the Third was obstinate and un- 
scrupulous, but because men felt the enormous political 
dangers involved in their proposal. The question, in 
fact, could only be solved by a new invention. The 
expedient of administering an oath to the Directors 
that they would make their requirements honestly, proved 
to be useless, and the requirements that the nominees 
of the Directors should submit to a special training at 
Hayleybury, though more effective, left the main evil 
of patronage untouched. 

As early, therefore, as 1833, the Government Bill 
introduced by Macaulay for the renewal and revision 
of the Company's charter contained a clause providing 
that East India cadetships should be thrown open to 



264 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



competition/ For the time the influence of the Direc- 
tors was sufficient to prevent so great a change from 
being effected, but in 1853, on a further renewal of the 
Charter, the system of competition was definitely 
adopted, and the first open examination for cadetships 
took place in 1855. 

In the meantime Sir Charles Trevelyan, a distin- 
guished Indian Civilian who had married Macaulay's 
sister, had been asked to inquire, with the help of 
Sir Stafford Northcote, into the method of appointment 
in the Home Civil Service. His report appeared in 
the spring of 1854,^ and is one of the ablest of those 
State Papers which have done so much to mould the 
English constitution during the last two generations. 
It showed the intolerable effects on the personnel of 
the existing Service of the system by which the Patronage 
Secretary of the Treasury distributed appointments in 
the national Civil Service among those members of 
parliament whose votes were to be influenced or re- 
warded, and it proposed that all posts requiring in- 
tellectual qualifications should be thrown open to those 
young men of good character who succeeded at a com- 
petitive examination in the subjects which then consti- 
tuted the education of a gentleman. 
But to propose that members of parliament should 

1 It would be interesting if Lord Morley, now that he has access to the 
records of the East India House, would tell us the true intellectual his- 
tory of this far-reaching suggestion. For the facts as now known, of. A. 
L. Lowell, Colonial Civil Service, pp. 243-256. 

2 Reports and Papers on the Civil Service, 1854-5. 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 265 

give up their OAvn patronage was a very different thing 
from asking them to take away the patronage of the 
East India Company. Sir Charles Trevelyan, there- 
fore, before publishing his proposal, sent it round to a 
number of distinguished persons both inside and out- 
side the Government service, and printed their very 
frank replies in an appendix. 

Most of his correspondents thought that the idea was 
hopelessly impracticable. It seemed like the intrusion 
into the world of politics of a scheme of cause and effect 
derived from another universe — as if one should propose 
to the Stock Exchange that the day's prices should be 
fixed by prayer and the casting of lots. Lingen, for 
instance, the permanent head of the Education Office, 
wrote "considering that, as a matter of fact, patronage 
is one element of power, and not by any means an un- 
real one; considering the long and inestimably valuable 
habituation of the people of this country to political 
contests in which the share of office . . . reckons among 
the legitimate prizes of war; considering that socially 
and in the business of life, as well as in Downing Street, 
rank and wealth (as a fact, and whether we like it or 
not) hold the keys of many things, and that our modes 
of thinking and acting proceed, in a thousand ways, 
upon this supposition, considering all these things, I 
should hesitate long before I advised such a revolution 
of the Civil Service as that proposed by yourself and 
Sir Stafford Northcote."^ Sir James Stephen of the 
1 Reports and Papers on the Civil Service, pp. 104, 105. 



266 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



Colonial Office put it more bluntly, "The world we live 
in is not, I think, half moralized enough for the accept- 
ance of such a scheme of stern morality as this." ^ 
When, a few years later, competition for commissions 
in the Indian army was discussed. Queen Victoria (or 
Prince Albert through her) objected that it "reduced 
the sovereign to a mere signing machine." ^ 

In 1870, however, sixteen years after Trevelyan's 
Report, Gladstone established open competition through- 
out the English Civil Service, by an order in Council 
which was practically uncriticized and unopposed; and 
the parliamentary government of England in one of its 
most important functions did in fact reduce itself "to a 
mere signing machine." 

The causes of the change in the political atmosphere 
which made this possible constitute one of the most 
interesting problems in English history. One cause is 
obvious. In 1867 Lord Derby's Reform Act had 
suddenly transferred the ultimate control of the House 
of Commons from the "ten pound householders" in the 
boroughs to the working men. The old "governing 
classes" may well have felt that the patronage which 
they could not much longer retain would be safer in the 
hands of an independent Civil Service Commission, 
interpreting, like a blinded figure of Justice, the verdict 
of Nature, than in those of the dreaded "caucuses," 
which Mr. Schnadhorst was already organizing. 

1 Reports and papers on the Civil Service, p. 78. 

2Li/e of Queen Victoria, vol. iii, p. 377 (July 29, 1858). 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 267 

But one seems to detect a deeper cause of change than 
the mere transference of voting power. The fifteen 
years from the Crimean War to 1870 were in England 
a period of wide mental activity, during which the 
conclusions of a few penetrating thinkers like Darwin 
or Newman were discussed and popularized by a crowd 
of magazine writers and preachers and poets. The 
conception was gaining ground that it was upon serious 
and continued thought and not upon opinion that the 
power to carry out our purposes, whether in politics or 
elsewhere, must ultimately depend. 

Carlyle in 1850 had asked whether "democracy once 
modelled into suffrages, furnished with ballot-boxes 
and such-like, will itself accomplish the salutary 
universal change from Delusive to Real," and had 
answered, "Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its 
excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and 
that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious 
exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round 
Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted 
for, and fixed with adamantine rigour by the ancient 
Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you 
vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain 
those conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will 
• get round the Cape : if you cannot — the ruffian Winds 
will blow you ever back again. "^ 

By 1870 Carlyle's lesson was already well started 

1 Latter Day Pamphlets, No. 1, The Present Time. (Chapman and 
HaU, 1894, pp. 12 and 14.) 



268 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

on its course from paradox to platitude. The most 
important single influence in that course had been the 
growth of Natural Science. It was, for instance, in 1870 
that Huxley's "Lay Sermions" were collected and pub- 
lished. People who could not in 1850 understand Car- 
lyle's distinction between the Delusive and the Real, 
could not help understanding Huxley's comparison of 
life and death to a game of chess with an unseen oppo- 
nent who never makes a mistake.^ And Huxley's im- 
personal Science seemed a more present aid in the voy- 
age round Cape Horn than Carlyle's personal and impos- 
sible Hero. 

But the invention of a competitive Civil Service, when 
it had once been made and adopted, dropped from the 
region of severe and difficult thought in which it ori- 
ginated, and took its place in our habitual political 
psychology. We now half -consciously conceive of the 
Civil Service as an unchanging fact whose good and bad 
points are to be taken or left as a whole. Open 
competition has by the same process become a "prin- 
ciple," conceived of as applying to those cases to which 
it has been in fact applied, and to no others. What is 
therefore for the moment most needed, if we are to think 
fruitfully on the subject, is that we should in our own 
minds break up this fact, and return to the world of 
infinite possible variations. We must think of the ex- 
pedient of competition itself as varying in a thousand 

^ Lay Sermons, p. 31, "A Liberal Education" (1868). 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 269 



different directions, and shading by imperceptible grad- 
ations into other methods of appointment; and of the 
posts offered for competition as differing each from 
all the rest, as overlapping those posts for which compe- 
tition in some form is suitable though it has not yet 
been tried, and as touching, at the marginal point on 
their cun^e, those posts for which competition is un- 
suitable. 

Directly we begin this process one fact becomes ob- 
vious. There is no reason why the same system should 
not be applied to the appointment of the officials of 
the local as to those of the central government. It 
is an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of 
the English people that we have never seriously con- 
sidered this point. In America the term Civil Service 
is applied equally to both groups of offices, and "Civil 
Service principles" are understood to cover State and 
Municipal as well as Federal appointments. The 
separation of the two systems in our minds may, 
indeed, be largely due to the mere accident that from 
historical reasons we call them by different names. 
As it is, the local authorities are (with the exception 
that certain qualifications are required for teachers and 
medical officers) left free to do as they will in making 
appointments. Perhaps half a dozen Metropolitan 
and provincial local bodies have adopted timid and 
limited schemes of open competition. But in all otlier 
cases the local civil servants, who are already probably 



270 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



as numerous as those of the central government/ are 
appointed under conditions which, if the Government 
chose to create a Commission of Inquiry, would prob- 
ably be found to have reproduced many of the evils that 
existed in the patronage of the central government before 
1855. 

It would not, of course, be possible to appoint a sepa- 
rate body of Civil Service Commissioners to hold a sepa- 
rate examination for each locality, and difficulties would 
arise from the selection of officials by a body responsible 
only to the central government, and out of touch with 
the local body which controls, pays, and promotes 
them when appointed. But similiar difficulties have 
been obviated by American Civil Service Reformers, 
and a few days' hard thinking would suffice to adapt the 
system to English local conditions. 

One object aimed at by the creation of a competitive 
Civil Service for the central government in England was 
the prevention of corruption. It was made more 
difficult for representatives and officials to conspire to- 
gether in order to defraud the public, when the official 
ceased to owe his appointment to the representative. 
If an English member of parliament desire^ now to make 
money out of his position, he would have to corrupt a 
whole series of officials in no way dependent on his 
favour, who perhaps intensely dislike the human type to 

1 The figures in the census of 1901 were — National, 90,000; Local, 71, 
000. But the local officials since then have, I believe, increased much 
more rapidly than the national. 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 271 

which he belongs, and who would be condemned to dis- 
grace or imprisonment years after he had lost his seat if 
some record of their joint misdoing were unearthed. 

This precaution against corruption is needed even 
more clearly under the conditions of local government. 
The expenditure of local bodies in the United Kingdom 
is already much larger than that of the central State, 
and is increasing at an enormously greater rate, while 
the fact that most of the money is spent locally, and in 
comparatively small sums, makes fraud easier. Eng- 
lish municipal life is, I believe, on the whole pure, but 
fraud does occur, and is encouraged by the close 
connection that may exist between the officials and the 
representatives. A needy or thick-skinned urban coun- 
cillor or guardian may at any moment tempt, or be 
tempted, by a poor relation who helped him at his elec- 
tion, and for whom (perhaps as the result of a tacit un- 
derstanding that similar favours should be allowed to 
his colleagues), he obtained a municipal post. 

The railway companies, again, in England are coming 
every year more and more under State control, but no 
statesman has ever attempted to secure in their case, as 
was done in the case of the East India Company a cen- 
tury ago, some reasonable standard of purity and im- 
partiality in appointments and promotion. Some few 
railways have systems of competition for boy clerks, 
even more inadequate than those carried on by munici- 
palities; but one is told that under most of the companies 
both appointment and promotion may be influenced by 



272 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

the favour of directors or large shareholders. We 
regulate the minutiae of coupling and signalling on the 
railways, but do not realize that the safety of the public 
depends even more directly upon their systems of pa- 
tronage. 

How far this principle should be extended, and how 
far, for instance, it would be possible to prevent the 
head of a great private firm from ruining half a country 
side by leaving the management of his business to a 
hopelessly incompetent relation, is a question which 
depends, among other things, upon the powers of poli- 
tical invention which may be developed by collectivist 
thinkers in the next fifty years. 

We must meanwhile cease to treat the existing system 
of competition by the hasty writing of answers to un- 
expected examination questions as an unchangeable 
entity. That system has certain very real advantages. 
It is felt by the candidates and their relations to be 
"fair." It reveals facts about the relative powers of the 
candidates in some important intellectual qualities 
which no testimonials would indicate, and which are 
often unknown, till tested, to the candidates themselves. 
But if the sphere of independent selection is to be widely 
extended, greater variety must be introduced into its 
methods. In this respect invention has stood still in 
England since the publication of Sir Charles Trevelyan's 
Report in 1855. Some slight modifications have taken 
place in the subjects chosen for examination, but the 
enormous changes in English educational conditions 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 273 

during the last half century have been for the most part 
ignored. It is still assumed that young Englishmen con- 
sist of a small minority who have received the nearly 
uniform "education of a gentleman," and a large major- 
ity who have received no intellectual training at all. The 
spread of varied types of secondary schools, the increas- 
ing specialization of higher education, and the experi- 
ence which all the universities of the world have accumu- 
lated as to the possibility of testing the genuineness and 
intellectual quality of "post graduate" theses have had 
little or no effect. 

The Playfair Commission of 1875 found that a few 
women were employed for strictly subordinate work 
in the Post Office. Since then female typewriters and 
a few better-paid women have been introduced into 
other offices in accordance with the casual impulses 
of this or that parliamentary or permanent chief; but 
no systematic attempt has been made to enrich the 
thinking power of the State by using the trained and 
patient intellects of the women who graduate each year 
in the newer, and "qualify by examination to graduate," 
in the older Universities. 

To the general public, indeed, the adoption of open 
competition in 1870 seemed to obviate any necessity 
for further consideration not only of the method by 
which officials were appointed but also of the system 
under which they did their work. The race of Tite 
Barnacles, they learnt, was now to become extinct. Ap- 
pointment was to be made by "merit," and the announce- 



274 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

ment of the examination results, like the wedding in a 
middle- Victorian novel, was to be the end of the story. 
But in a Government office, as certainly as in a law-court 
or a laboratory, eifective thinking will not be done 
unless adequate opportunities and motives are secured 
by organization during the whole working life of the 
appointed officials. Since 1870, however, the organi- 
zation of the Government Departments has either been 
left to the casual development of office tradition in 
each Department or has been changed (as in the case 
of the War Office) by an agitation directed against one 
Department only. The official relations, for instance, 
between the First Division minority and the Second 
Division majority of the clerks in each office vary, not 
on any considered principle, but according to the 
t)pinions and prejudices of some once-dominant but 
now forgotten chief. The same is true of the relation 
between the heads o( each section and the officials 
immediately below them. In at least one office im- 
portant papers are brought first to the chief. His 
decision is at once made, and is sent down the hierarchy 
for elaboration. In other offices the younger men are 
given invaluable experience, and the elder men are pre- 
vented from getting into an official rut, by a system 
which requires that all papers should be sent first to a 
junior, who sends them up to his senior accompanied 
not only by the necessary papers but also by a minute 
of his own suggesting official action. One of these 
two types of organization must in fact be better than 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 275 



the other, but no one has systematically compared them. 

In the Colonial Office, again, it is the duty of the 
Librarian to see that the published books as well as 
the office records on any question are available for 
every official who has to report on it. In the Board 
of Trade, which deals with subjects on which the im- 
portance of published as compared with official infor- 
mation is even greater, room has only just been found 
for a technical library which was collected many years 
ago.^ The Foreign Office and the India Office have 
libraries, the Treasury and the Local Government Board 
have none. 

In the Exchequer and Audit Department a deliber- 
ate policy has been adopted of training junior officials 
by transferring them at regular intervals to different 
branches of the work. The results are said to be 
excellent, but nothing of the kind is systematically 
done or has even been seriously discussed in any other 
Department which I know. 

Nearly all departmental officials are concerned with 
the organization of non-departmental work more directly 
executive than their own, and part of a wise system 
of official training would consist in "seconding" young 
officials for experience in the kind of work which they 
are to organize. The clerks of the Board of Agriculture 
should be sent at least once in their career to help in 
superintending the killing of infected swine and inter- 

1 For a long time the Library of the Board of Trade was kept at the 
Foreign Office. 



276 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

viewing actual farmers, while an official in the Railway 
section of the Board of Trade should acquire some 
personal knowledge of the inside of a railway office. 
This principle of "seconding" might well be extended 
so as to cover (as is already done in the army) definite 
periods of study during which an official, on leave of 
absence with full pay, should acquire knowledge useful 
to his department ; after which he should show the result 
of his work, not by the answering of examination ques- 
tions, but by the presentation of a book or report of 
permanent value. 

The grim necessity of providing, after the events of 
the Boer War, for effective thought in the government 
of the British army produced the War Office Council. 
The Secretary of State, instead of knowing only of those 
suggestions that reach him through the "bottle-neck" of 
his senior official's mind, now sits once a week at a 
table with half a dozen heads of sub-departments. He 
hears real discussion; he learns to pick men for higher 
work; and saves many hours of circumlocutory writing. 
At the same time, owing to a well-known fact in the 
physiology of the human brain, the men who are tired 
of thinking on paper find a new stimulus in the spoken 
word and the presence of their fellow human beings, 
just as politicians who are tired with talking, find, if 
their minds are still uninjured, a new stimulus in the 
silent use of a pen. 

If this periodical alternation of written and oral 
discussion is useful in the War Office, it would pro- 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 277 

bably be useful in other offices ; but no one with sufficient 
autliority to require an answer has ever asked if it is so. 

One of the most important functions of a modern 
Government is the effective publication of information, 
but we have no Department of Publicity, though we 
have a Stationery Office; and it is, for instance, appar- 
ently a matter of accident whether any particular 
Department has or has not a Gazette and how and 
when that Gazette is published. Nor is it any one's 
business to discover and criticize and if necessaiy co- 
ordinate the statistical methods of the various official 
publications. 

On these points and many others a small Depart- 
mental Committee (somewhat on the lines of that Esher 
Committee which reorganized the War Office in 1904), 
consisting perhaps of an able manager of an Insurance 
Company, with an open-minded Civil Servant, and a 
business man w4th experience of commercial and depart- 
mental organization abroad, might suggest such im- 
provements as would without increase of expense double 
the existing intellectual output of our Government offices. 

But such a Committee will not be appointed unless 
the ordinary members of parliament, and especially the 
members who advocate a wide extension of collective 
action, consider much more seriously than they do at 
present the organization of collective thought. How, 
for instance, are we to prevent or minimize the danger 
that a body of officials will develop "official" habits of 
thought, and a sense of a corporate interest opposed 



278 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

to that of the majority of the people? If a sufficient pro- 
portion of the ablest and best equipped young men of 
each generation are to be induced to come into the Gov- 
ernment service they must be offered salaries which place 
them at once among the well-to-do classes. How are we 
to prevent them siding consciously or unconsciously on 
all questions of administration with their economic 
equals? If they do, the danger is not only that social 
reform will be delayed, but also that working men in 
England may acquire that hatred and distrust of highly 
educated permanent officials which one notices in any 
gathering of working men in America. 

We are sometimes told, now that good education 
is open to every one, that men of every kind of social 
origin and class sympathy will enter to an increasing 
extent the higher Civil Service. If that takes place it 
will be an excellent thing, but meanwhile any one who 
follows the development of the existing examination 
system knows that care is required to guard against the 
danger that preference in marking may, if only from 
official tradition, be given to subjects like Greek and 
Latin composition, whose educational value is not higher 
than others, but excellence in which is hardly ever ac- 
quired except by members of one social class. 

It would, of course, be ruinous to sacrifice intellectual 
efficiency to the dogma of promotion from the ranks, and 
the statesmen of 1870 were perhaps right in thinking 
that promotion from the second to the first division of 
the service would be in their time so rare as to be 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 279 



negligible. But things have changed since then. The 
competition for the second division has become incom- 
parably more severe, and there is no reasonable test 
under which some of those second class officials who 
have continued their education by means of reading and 
University teaching in the evening would not show, at 
thirty years of age, a greater fitness for the highest work 
than would be shown by many of those who had entered 
by the more advanced examination. 

But however able our officials are, and however varied 
their origin, the danger of the narrowness and rigidity 
which has hitherto so generally resulted from official 
life would still remain, and must be guarded against 
by every kind of encouragement to free intellectual 
development. The German Emperor did good service 
the other day when he claimed (in a semi-official com- 
munication on the Tweedmouth letter) that the persons 
who are Kings and Ministers in their official capacity 
have as Fachmanner (experts) other and wider rights 
in the republic of thought. One only wishes that he 
would allow his own officials after their day's work to 
regroup themselves, in the healthy London fashion, with 
labour leaders, and colonels, and schoolmasters, and 
court ladies, and members of parliament, as individual- 
ists or socialists, or protectors of African aborigines, 
or theosophists, or advocates of a free stage or a free 
ritual. 

The intellectual life of the government official is 
indeed becoming part of a problem which every year 



280 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

touches us all more closely. In literature and science 
as well as in commerce and industry the independent 
producer is dying out and the official is taking his place. 
We are nearly all of us officials now, bound during our 
working days, whether we write on a newspaper, or 
teach in a university, or keep accounts in a bank, by 
restrictions on our personal freedom in the interest of 
a larger organization. We are little influenced by that 
direct and obvious economic motive which drives a small 
shopkeeper or farmer or country solicitor to a desperate 
intensity of scheming how to outstrip his rivals or make 
more profit out of his employees. If we merely desire 
to do as little work and enjoy as much leisure as possible 
in our lives, we all find that it pays us to adopt that 
steady unanxious "stroke" which neither advances nor 
retards promotion. 

The indirect stimulus, therefore, of interest and 
variety, of public spirit and the craftsman's delight in 
his skill, is becoming more important to us as a motive 
for the higher forms of mental effort, and threats and 
promises of decrease or increase of salary less im- 
portant. And because those higher efforts are needed 
not only for the advantage of the community but for 
the good of our own souls we are all of us concerned 
in teaching those distant impersonal masters of ours 
who are ourselves how to prevent the opportunity of 
effective thought from being confined to a tiny rich 
minority, living, like the Cyclopes, in irresponsible free- 
dom. If we consciously accept the fact that organized 



OFFICIAL THOUGHT 281 

work will in the future be the rule and unorganized 
work the exception, and if we deliberately adjust our 
methods of working as well as our personal ideals to 
that condition, we need no longer feel that the direction 
of public business must be divided between an unin- 
structed and unstable body of politicians and a selfish 
and pedantic bureaucracy. 



CHAPTER IV 

NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 

I HAVE discussed, in the three preceding chapters, the 
probable effect of certain existing intellectual tendencies 
on our ideals of political conduct, our systems of repre- 
sentation, and the methods which we adopt for securing 
intellectual initiative and efficiency among our profes- 
sional officials — that is to say, on the internal organi- 
zation of the State. 

In this chapter I propose to discuss the effect of the 
same tendencies on international and interracial re- 
lations. But, as soon as one leaves the single State 
and deals with the interrelation of several States, one 
meets with the preliminary question, What is a State? 
Is the British Empire, or the Concert of Europe, one 
State or many? Every community in either aiea now 
exerts political influence on every other, and the tele- 
graph and the steamship have abolished most of the 
older limitations on the further development and exten- 
sion of that influence. Will the process of coalescence 
go on either in feeling or in constitutional form, or are 
there any permanent causes tending to limit the 
geographical or racial sphere of effective political 
solidarity, and therefore the size and composition of 
States? 

282 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 283 



Aristotle, writing under the conditions of the ancient 
world, laid it down that a community whose population 
extended to a hundred thousand would no more be a 
State than would one whose population was confined to 
ten/ He based his argument on measurable facts as to 
the human senses and the human memory. The territory 
of a State must be "visible as a whole" by one mean's eye, 
and the assembly attended by all the full citizens must 
be able to hear one voice — which must be that of an 
actual man and not of the legendary Stentor. The 
governing officials must be able to remember the faces 
and characters of all their fellow citizens.' He did not 
ignore the fact that nearly all the world's surface as he 
knew it was occupied by States enormously larger than 
his rule allowed. But he denied that the great barbarian 
monarchies were in the truest sense "States" at all. 

We ourselves are apt to forget that the facts on 
which Aristotle relied were both real and important. 
The history of the Greek and mediaeval City-States shows 
how effective a stimulus may be given to some of the 
highest activities and emotions of mankind when the 
whole environment of each citizen comes within the first- 
hand range of his senses and memory. It is now only 
here and there, in villages outside the main stream of 
civilization, that men know the faces of their neighbours, 
and see daily as part of one whole the fields and cottages 
in which they work and rest. Yet, even now, when a 

1 Ethics, IX., X. 3. 

2 Aristotle, Polit., Bk. vii. ch. iv. 



284 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

village is absorbed by a sprawling suburb or over- 
whelmed by the influx of a new industrial population, 
some of the older inhabitants feel that they are losing 
touch with the deeper realities of life 

A year ago I stood with a hard-walking and hard- 
thinking old Yorkshire schoolmaster on the high moor- 
land edge of Airedale. Opposite to us was the country- 
house where Charlotte Bronte was governess, and below 
us ran the railway, linking a string of manufacturing 
villages which already were beginning to stretch out 
towards each other, and threatened soon to extend through 
the valley an unbroken succession of tall chimneys and 
slate roofs. He told me how, within his memory, the 
old aff'ection f or place and home had disappeared from 
the district. I asked whether he thought that a new 
affection was possible, whether, now that men lived in 
the larger world of knowledge and inference, rather 
than in the narrower world of sight and hearing, a patriot- 
ism of books and maps might not appear which should 
be a better guide to life than the patriotism of the village 
street. 

This he strongly denied; as the older feeling went, 
nothing, he said, had taken its place, or would take its 
place, but a naked and restless individualism, always 
seeking for personal satisfaction, and always missing 
it. And then, almost in the words of Morris and Ruskin, 
he began to urge that we should pay a cheap price if we 
could regain the true riches of life by forgetting steam 
and electricity, and returning to the agriculture of the 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 285 

mediaeval village and the handicrafts of the mediaeval 
town. 

He knew and I knew that his plea was hopeless. Even 
under the old conditions the Greek and Italian and 
Flemish City-States perished, because they were too 
small to protect themselves against larger though less 
closely organized communities; and industrial progress 
is an invader even more irresistible than the armies of 
Macedon or Spain. For a constantly increasing pro- 
portion of the inhabitants of modem England there is 
now no place where in the old sense they "live." Nearly 
the whole of the class engaged in the direction of English 
industry, and a rapidly increasing proportion of the 
manual workers, pass daily in tram or train between 
sleeping-place and working-place a hundred times more 
sights than their eyes can take in or their memory retain. 
They are, to use Mr. Wells's phrase, "delocalized."^ 

But now that we can no longer take the range of our 
senses as a basis for calculating the possible area of the 
civilized State, there might seem to be no facts at all 
which can be used for such a calculation. How can w^e 
fix the limits of effective intercommunication by steam 
or electricity, or the area which can be covered by such 
political expedients as representation and federalism? 
When Aristotle wished to illustrate the relation of the 
size of the State to the powers of its citizens he compared 
it to a ship, which, he said, must not be too large to be 
handled by the muscles of actual men. "A ship of two 
1 Mankind in the Making, p. 406. 



286 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

furlongs length would not be a ship at all."^ But the 
Lusitania is already not very far from a furlong and a 
half in length, and no one can even guess what is the 
upward limit of size which the ship-builders of a 
generation hence will have reached. If once we assume 
that a State may be larger than the field of vision of a 
single man, then the merely mechanical difficulty of 
bringing the whole earth under a government as effective 
as that of the United States or the British Empire has 
already been overcome. If such a government is im- 
possible, its impossibilit}?^ must be due to the limits not 
of our senses and muscles but of oui* powers of imagina- 
tion and sympathy. 

I have already pointed out^ that the modem State 
must exist for the thoughts and feelings of its citizens, 
not as a fact of direct observation but as an entity of 
the mind, a symbol, a personification or an abstraction. 
The possible area of the State will depend, therefore, 
mainly on the facts which limit our creation and use of 
such entities. Fifty years ago the statesmen who were 
reconstructing Europe on the basis of nationality thought 
that they had found the relevant facts in the causes which 
limit the physical and mental homogeneity of nations. A 
State, they thought, if it is to be effectively governed, 
must be a homogeneous "nation," because no citizen 
can imagine his State or make it the object of his political 
affection unless he believes in the existence of a national 

1 Aristotle, Polit., Bk- vii. ch. iv. 

2 Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81. 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 287 



type to which the individual inhabitants of the State are 
assimilated ;and he cannot continue to believe in the 
existence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens 
are like each other and like himself in certain important 
respects. Bismarck deliberately limited the area of his 
intended German Empire by a quantitive calculation as 
to the possibility of assimilating other Germans to the 
Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion of 
Austria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, 
on the ground that while the Prussian type was strong 
enough to assimilate the Saxons and Hanoverians to 
itself, it would fail t?o assimilate Austrians and Bavarians. 
He said, for instance, in 1866: "We cannot use these 
Ultramontanes, and we must not swallow more than we 
can digest."^ 

Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could 
be well governed unless it consisted of a homogeneous 
nation. But Bismarck's policy of the artificial assimi- 
lation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to him 
the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans 
for the reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of 
God, as revealed by the existing correspondence of 
national uniformities with geographical facts. "God," 
he said, "divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei 
upon the face of the earth. . . . Evil governments 
have disfigured the Divine design. Nevertheless you 
may still trace it, distinctly marked out — at least as far 
as Europe is concerned — by the course of the great rivers, 

1 Bismarck (J. W. Headlam), p. 269. 



288 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

the direction of the higher mountains, and other geo- 
graphical conditions."^ 

Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with 
all their strength the humanitarianism of the French 
Revolution, the philosophy which, as Canning said, 
"reduced the nation into individuals in order after- 
wards to congregate them into mobs."^ Mazzini 
attacked the "cosmopolitans," who preached that all 
men should love each other without distinction of 
nationality, on the ground that they were asking for a 
psychological impossibility. No man, he argued, can 
imagine, and therefore no one can love, mankind, if 
mankind means to him all the millions of individual 
human beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the 
original Carbonari for this reason: "The cosmopolitan," 
he then said, "alone in the midst of the immense circle 
by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend 
beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other 
weapons than the consciousness of his rights (often mis- 
conceived) and his individual faculties— which, however 
powerful, are incapable of extending their activity 
over the whole sphere of application constituting the 
aim . . . has but two paths before him. He is com- 
pelled to choose between despotism and inertia." ^ He 
quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he puts out to sea, 

1 Life and Writirigs (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written 1858), p. 
275. 

2 Canning, Life by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818), 

3 Mazzini, Life and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iii. p. 8. 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 289 



prays to God, "Help me my God! My boat is so small 
and Thy ocean so wide." ^ 

For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood there- 
fore between the individual man and the unimaginable 
multitude of the human race. A man could comprehend 
and love his nation because it consisted of beings like 
himself "speaking the same language, gifted with the 
same tendencies and educated by the same historical 
tradition," ^ and could be thought of as a single national 
entity. The nation was "the intermediate term between 
humjanity and the individual," ^ and man could only 
attain to the conception of humanity by picturing it to 
himself as a mosaic of homogeneous nations. "Nations 
are the citizens of humanity as individuals are the citizens 
of the nation," * and again, "The pact of humanity can- 
not be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal 
peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the conscious- 
ness of a distinct existence." ^ 

Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by 
Mazzini, played a great and valuable part in the de- 
velopment of the political consciousness of Europe 
during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less 
and less possible to accept it as a solution for the 
problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now 

1 Mazzini, Life and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. p. 274. 

^Ibid vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858). 

3 Ibid, vol. V. p. 273. 

^Ibid., vol. V. p. 274 (written 1849). 

^Ibid., vol. iii. p. 15 (written 1836). 



290 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

assert with Mazzini that the "indisputable tendency of 
our epoch is towards a reconstitution of Europe into a 
certain number of homogeneous national States "as 
nearly as possible equal in population and extent." ^ 
Mazzini, indeed, unconsciously but enormously exagger- 
ated the simplicity of the question even in his own time. 
National types throughout the greater part of South-east- 
em Europe were not even then divided into homoge- 
neous units by "the course of the great rivers and the di- 
rection of the high mountains," but were intermingled 
from village to village; and events have since forced us 
to admit that fact. We no longer, for instance, can be- 
lieve, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciples 
of Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the 
eighteen sixties, that Hungary is inhabited only by a 
homogeneous population of patriotic Magyars. We can 
see that Mazzini was already straining his principle to 
the breaking point when he said in 1852: "It is in the 
power of Greece ... to become, by extending itself to 
Constantinople, a powerful barrier against the European 
encroachments of Russia." ^ In Macedonia to-day bands 
of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the 
pure tradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to extermi- 
nate the rival populations in order to establish their 
own claim to represent the purposes of God as indicated 
by the position of the Balkan mountains. Mazzini him- 

1 Mazzini, Life and Writings (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 275. 
^Ibid., vol. vi. p. 258. 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 291 

self would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if 
the Bismarckian policy of artificial assimilation is to be 
rejected, there must continue to be some States in Europe 
which contain inhabitants belonging to widely different 
national types. 

Bismarck's conception of an artificial uniformity 
created by "blood and iron" corresponded more closely 
than did Mazzini's to the facts of the nineteenth century. 
But its practicability depended upon the assumption 
that the members of the dominant nationality would 
always vehemently desire to impose their own type on 
the rest. Now that the Social-Democrats, who are a not 
inconsiderable proportion of the Prussian population, 
apparently admire their Polish or Bavarian or Danish 
fellow-subjects all the more because they cling to their 
own national characteristics. Prince Billow's Bismarck- 
ian dictum the other day, that the strength of Germany 
depends on the existence and dominance of an intensely 
national Prussia, seemed a mere political survival. The 
same change of feeling has also sho^vn itself in the 
United Kingdom, and both the English parties have now 
tacitly or explicitly abandoned the Anglicization of 
Ireland and Wales, which all parties once accepted as a 
necessary part of English policy. 

A still more important difficulty in applying the prin- 
ciple that the area of the State should be based on 
homogeneity of national type, whether natural or 
artificial, has been created by the rapid extension during 
the last twenty-five years of all the larger European 



(292 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

I , 

States into non-European territory. Neither Mazzini, 
till his death in 1872, nor Bismarck, till the colonial 
adventure of 1884, was compelled to take into his cal- 
culations the inclusion of territories and peoples outside 
Europe. Neither of them, therefore, made any effective 
intellectual preparation for those problems which have 
been raised in our time by "the scramble for the world." 
Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguely expected that 
nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and 
Africa, and that the "pact of humanity" would ultimately 
be "signed" by homogeneous and independent "nations," 
who would cover the whole land surface of tlie globe. 
But he never indicated the political forces by which that 
result was to be brought about. The Italian invasion of 
Abyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either 
as a necessary stage in the Mazzinian policy of spread- 
ing the idea of nationality to Africa, or as a direct con- 
tradiction of that idea itself. 

Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical in- 
tellect, never looked forward, as Mazzini did, to a "pact 
of humanity," which should include even the nations of 
Europe, and, indeed, always protested against the at- 
tempt to conceive of any relation whatosover, moral or 
political, as existing between any State and the States or 
populations outside its boundaries. "The only sound 
principle of action," he said, "for a great State is 
political egoism." ^ When, therefore, after Bismarck's 
death German sailors and soldiers found themselves 

1 Speech, 1850, quoted by J, W. Headlam, Bismarck, p. 83. 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 293 



in contact with the defenseless inhabitants of China or 
East Africa, they were, as the Social Democrats quickly 
pointed out, provided with no conception of the situa- 
tion more highly developed than that which was acted 
upon in the fifth century A.D., by Attila and his Huns. 
The modern English imperialists tried for some time 
to apply the idea of national homogeneity to the facts of 
the British Empire. From the publication of Seeley's 
"Expansion of England" in 1883 till the Peace of Verce- 
niging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of 
a "Blood," an "Island Race," consisting of homogene- 
ous English-speaking individuals, among whom were to 
be reckoned not only the whole population of the United 
Kingdom, but all the reasonably white inhabitants of our 
colonies and dependencies; while they thought of the 
other inhabitants of the Empire as "the white man's bur- 
den" — the necessary material for the exercise of the 
white man's virtues. The idealists among them, when 
they were forced to realize that such a homogeneity of 
the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that 
it would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of 
the reading of imperial poems and the summoning of 
an imperial council. The Bismarckian realists among 
them believed that it would be brought about, in South 
Africa and elsewhere, by "blood and iron." Lord Mil- 
ner, who is perhaps the most loyal adherent of the Bis- 
marckian tradition to be found out of Germany, con- 
tended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers 
on any terms except such an unconditional surrender as 



294 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

would involve the ultimate Anglicization of the South 
African colonies. He still dreams of a British Empire 
whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's 
Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, 
against those "ideas of our youth" which were "at once 
too insular and too cosmopolitan."^ 

But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, 
imperial egoism is now deprived of its only possible 
psychological basis. It is to be based not upon national 
homogeneity but upon the consciousness of national va- 
riation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely 
French, and the Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; 
though both are to be divided from the world outside 
the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral chasm. 
To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The 
loyal acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir 
Wilfred Laurier or General Botha constitute something 
more subtle, something, to adapt Lord Milner's phrase, 
less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial egoism. 
It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference 
to the question whether France or Holland shall be swal- 
lowed up by the sea. 

At the same time the non-white races within the 
Empire show no signs of enthusiastic contentment at 
the prospect of existing, like the English "poor" during 
the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other 
men's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of 
nationality; and if those ideas do not ultimately break 

1 Times, Dec. 19, 1907. 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 295 



up our Empire, it will be because they are enlarged and 
held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial egoism, 
but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions 
which pay little heed to imperial or national frontiers. 
It may, however, be objected by our imperial "Real- 
politiker" that cosmopolitan feeling is at this moment 
both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini 
thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of 
the plain facts of our military position. Our Empire, 
they say, will have to fight for its existence against a 
German or a Russian Empire or both together during 
the next generation, and our only chance of success is to 
create that kind of imperial sentiment which has fight- 
ing value. If the white inhabitants of the Empire are 
encouraged to think of themjselves as a "dominant race," 
that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and a nat- 
ural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual 
fighting into a Bismarckian temper of imperial "ego- 
ism." Among the non-white inhabitants of the Empire 
(since either side in the next inter-imperial war will, 
after its first defeat, abandon the convention of 
only employing European troops against Europeans) 
we must discover and drill those races who like the Gurk- 
has and Soudanese, may be expected to fight for us and 
to hate our enemies without asking for political rights. 
In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the 
most fatal solvent of empire, that humanitarianism 
which concerns itself with the interests of our future 
opponents as well as those of our fellow-subjects. 



296 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

This sort of argument might of qourse be met by a 
reductio ad abswdum. If the policy of imperial egoism 
is a successful one it will be adopted by all empires alike, 
and whether we desire it or not, the victor in each inter- 
imperial war will take over the territory of the loser. 
After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, 
in the waste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modem 
civilization, two empires, England and Germany, or 
America and China, may remain. Both will possess an 
armament which represents the whole "surplus value," 
beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants. 
Both will contain white and yellow and brown and black 
men hating each other across a wavering line on the map 
of the world. But the struggle will go on, and, as the 
result of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one 
Empire will exist. "Imperial egoism," having worked 
itself out to its logical conclusion, will have no further 
meaning, and the inhabitants of the globe, diminished 
to half their number, will be compelled to consider the 
problems of race and of the organized exploitation of the 
globe from the point of view of mere humanitarianism. 

Is the suggestion completely wanting in practicability 
that we might begin that consideration before the struggle 
goes any further? Fifteen hundred years ago, in south- 
eastern Europe, men who held the Homoousian opinion 
of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the 
Homoiousians. The generals and other "Real-politiker" 
on both sides may have feared, like Lord Milner, lest 
their followers should become "too cosmopolitan," too 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 297 



ready to extend their sympathies across the frontiers of 
theology. "This," a Homoousian may have said , "is a 
practical matter. Unless our side learn by training 
themselves in theological egoism to hate the other side, 
we shall be beaten in the next battle." And yet we can 
now see that the practical interests of Europe were very 
little concerned with the question whether "we" or "they" 
won, but very seriously concerned with the question 
whether the division itself into "we" or "they" could 
not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy 
metaphysic, or of a way of thinking about humanity 
which made the continued existence of those who dis- 
agreed with one in theology no longer intolerable. May 
the Germans and ourselves be now marching towards 
the horrors of a world-war merely because "nation" 
and "empire" like "Homoousia" and "Homoiousia" are 
the best that we can do in making entities of the mind 
to stand between us and an unintelligible universe, and 
because having made such entities our sympathies are 
shut up within them? 

I have already urged, when considering the conditions 
of political reasoning, that many of the logical difficul- 
ties arising from our tendency to divide the infinite 
stream of our thoughts and sensations into homogeneous 
classes and species are now unnecessary and have been 
avoided in our time by the students of the natural 
sciences. Just as the modern artist substitutes without 
mental confusion his ever-varying curves and surfaces 
for the straight and simple lines of the savage, so the 



298 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying 
facts of nature without thinking of them as separate 
groups, each composed of identical individuals and rep- 
resented to us by a single type. 

Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals 
of the whole human race? Can we do, that is to say, 
what Mazzini declared to be impossible? And if we 
can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred million 
different human beings of whom we are thus enabled 
to think? 

To the first question the publication of the "Origin of 
Species" in 1859 offered an answer. Since then we 
have in fact been able to represent the human race to our 
imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying 
individuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, 
but as a biological group, every individual in which 
differs from every other not arbitrarily but according 
to an intelligible process of organic evolution.' And, 
since that which exists for the imagination can exist 
also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that 
the second question would also have been answered 
by evolution, and that the warring egoisms of nations 
and empires might henceforth have been dissolved by 

^ Sir Sydney Olivier, e. g. in his courageous and penetrating book 
White Capital and Coloured Labour considers (in chap, ii.) the racial 
distinctions between black and white from the point of view of evolu- 
tion. This consideration brings him at once to " the infinite, inexhaus- 
tible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much a fundamen- 
tal fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamating race- 
characteristics are merely incrustations concealing his sparkling vari- 
ety" (pp. 12, 13). 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 299 



love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we 
can watch as they work their way through so much 
pain and confusion towards a more harmonious relation 
to the universe. 

But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth 
century that the discovery of organic evolution, instead 
of stimulating such a general love of humanity, seemed 
at first to show that it was for ever impossible. Pro- 
gress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless 
struggle for life, which must still continue unless 
progress was to cease. Pity and love would turn the 
edge of the struggle, and therefore would lead inevit- 
ably to the degeneration of the species. 

This grim conception of an internecine conflict, 
inevitable and unending, in which all races must play 
their part, hung for a generation after 1859 over the 
study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sun hung 
over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked 
only by famine and war hung over the first century of 
political economy. Before Darwin wrote, it had been 
possible for philanthropists to think of the non-white 
races as "men and brothers" who, after a short process 
of education, would become in all respects except colour 
identical with themselves. Darwin made it clear that 
the difficulty could not be so glossed over. Racial 
variations were shown to be unaffected by education, 
to have existed for millions of years, and to be tending 
perhaps towards divergence rather than assimilation. 

The practical problem also of race relationship has, 



300 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

by a coincidence, presented itself since Darwin wrote 
in a sterner form. During the first half of the nine- 
teenth century the European colonists who were in 
daily contact with non-European races, although their 
impulses and their knowledge alike revolted from the 
optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall, yet could escape 
all thought about their own position by assuming that 
the problem would settle itself. To the natives of 
Australia or Canada or the Hottentots of South Africa 
trade automatically brought disease, and disease cleared 
the land for a stronger population. But the weakest 
races and individuals have now died out, the sundving 
populations are showing unexpected powers of resisting 
the white man's epidemics, and we are adding every 
year to our knowledge of, and therefore our respon- 
sibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing 
the time when the extermination of races, if it is done 
at all, must be done deliberately. 

If the extermination is to be both inevitable and 
deliberate how can there exist a community either of 
affection or purpose between the killers and the killed? 
No one at this moment professes, as far as I know, to 
have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The 
point of ethics lies within the region claimed by re- 
ligion. But Christianity, which at present is the 
religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuously failed 
even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The 
official Christian theory is, apparently, that all human 
souls are of equal value, and that it ought to be a 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 301/ 

matter of indifference to us whether a given territory 
is inhabited a thousand years hence by a million con- 
verted Central African pigmies or a million equally 
converted Europeans or Hindus. On the practical 
point, however, whether the stronger race should base 
its plans of extension on the extermination of the 
weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racial 
possibility, to improve it, Christians have, during the 
nineteenth century, been infinitely more ruthless than 
Mohammedans, though their ruthlessness has often been 
disguised by more or less conscious hypocrisy. 

But the most immediately dangerous result of 
political "Darwinism" was not its effect in justifying 
the extermination of African aborigines by European 
colonists, but the fact that the conception of the 
"struggle for life" could be used as a proof that that 
conflict among the European nations for the control 
of the trade-routes of the world which has been threaten- 
ing for the last quarter of a century is for each of the 
nations concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral 
duty. Lord Ampthill, for instance, the athletic ex- 
governor of Madras, said the other day: "From an 
individual struggle, a struggle of families, of com- 
munities, and nations, the struggle for existence has now 
advanced to a struggle of empires."^ 

The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill pro- 
claims that one-half of the species must needs slaughter 
the other half in the cause of human progress is 

1 Times, Jan. 22, 1908. 



302 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

■ 

particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may 
have to conduct negotiations as a member of the next 
Conservative Government with a German statesman 
like Prince Biilow, who seems to combine the teaching 
of Bismarck with what he understands to have been 
the teaching of Darwin when he defends the Polish 
policy of his master by a declaration that the rules 
of private morality do not apply to national conduct. 

Any such identification of the biological advantage 
arising from the "struggle for life" among individuals 
with that which is to be expected from a "struggle of 
empires" is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The 
"struggle of empires," must either be fought out between 
European troops alone, or between Europeans in com- 
bination with their non-European allies and subjects. 
If it takes the first form, and if we assume, as Lord 
Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial 
type is "higher" than any other, then the slaughter of 
half a million selected Englishmen and half a million 
selected Germans will clearly be an act of biological 
retrogression. Even if the non-European races are 
brought in, and a corresponding number of selected 
Turks and Arabs and Tartars, or of Gurkhas and Pathans 
and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biological loss to 
the world, as measured by the percentage of surviving 
"higher" or "lower" individuals will only be slightly 
diminished. 

Nor is that form of the argument much better 
founded which contends that the evolutionary advan- 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 



303 



tage to be expected from the "struggle of empires" is 
the "survivar' not of races but of political and cultural 
types. Our victory over the German Empire, for in- 
stance, would mean, it is said, a victory for the idea of 
political liberty. This argument, which, when urged 
by the rulers of India, sounds somewhat temerarious, 
requires the assumption that types of culture are in the 
modem world most successfully spread by military 
occupation. But in the ancient world Greek culture 
spread most rapidly after the fall of the Greek Empire ; 
Japan in our own time adopted Western culture more 
readily as an independent nation than she would have 
done as a dependency of Russia or France; and India 
is perhaps more likely today to learn from Japan than 
from England. 

Lord Ampthill's phrase, however, represents not so 
much an argument, as a habit of feeling shared by 
many who have forgotten or never known the biological 
doctrine which it echoes. The first followers of Darwin 
believed that the human species had been raised above 
its prehuman ancestors because, and in so far as, it had 
surrendered itself to a blind instinct of conflict. It 
seemed, therefore, as if the old moral precept that men 
should control their more violent impulses by reflection 
had been founded upon a mistake. Unreflecting in- 
stinct was, after all, the best guide, and nations who 
acted instinctively towards their neighbours might 
justify themselves, like the Parisian ruffians of ten 
years ago, by claiming to be "strugforlifeurs." 



304 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

If this habit of mind is to be destroyed it must be 
opposed, not merely by a new argument, but by a con- 
ception of man's relation to the universe which creates 
emotional force as well as intellectual conviction. 

And the change that has already shown itself in our 
conception of the struggle for life among individuals 
indicates that, by some divine chance, a corresponding 
change may come in our conception of the struggle 
between peoples. The evolutionists of our own time 
tell us that the improvement of the biological inheritance 
of any community is to be hoped for, not from the 
encouragement of individual conflict, but from the 
stimulation of the higher social impulses under the 
guidance of the science of eugenics; and the emotional 
effect of this new conception is already seen in the 
almost complete disappearance from industrial politics 
of that unwillingly brutal "individualism" which af- 
flicted kindly Englishmen in the eighteen sixties. 

An international science of eugenics might in the 
same way indicate that the various races should aim, 
not at exterminating each other, but at encouraging 
the improvement by each of its own racial type. Such 
an idea would not appeal to those for whom the whole 
species arranges itself in definite and obvious grades 
of "higher" and "lower," from the northern Europeans 
downwards, and who are as certain of the ultimate 
necessity of a "white world," as the Sydney politicians 
are of the necessity of a "white Australia." But in 
this respect during the last few years the inhabitants 



Nationality AND HUMANITY 305 



of Europe have shown signs of a new humility, due 
partly to widespread intellectual causes and partly to 
the hard facts of the Russo-Japanese war and the arming 
of China. The "spheres of influence," into which we 
divided the Far East eight years ago, seem to us now 
a rather stupid joke, and those who read history are 
already bitterly ashamed that we destroyed, by the sack 
of the Summer Palace in 1859, the products of a thou- 
sand years of such art as we can never hope to emulate. 
We are coming honestly to believe that the world is 
richer for the existence both of other civilizations and 
of other racial types tlian our own. We have been 
compelled by the study of the Christian documents to 
think of our religion as one only among the religions 
of the world, and to acknowledge that it has owed 
much and may owe much again to the longer philoso- 
phic tradition and the subtler and more patient brains 
of Hindustan and Persia. Even if we look at the 
future of the species as a matter of pure biology, we 
are warned by men of science tliat it is not safe to de- 
pend only on one family or one variety for the whole 
breeding-stock of the world. For the moment we 
shrink from the interbreeding of races, but we do so 
in spite of some conspicuous examples of successful 
interbreeding in the past, and largely because of our 
complete ignorance of the conditions on which success 
depends. 

Already, therefore, it is possible without intellectual 
dishonesty to look forward to a future for the race 



306 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 

i 

which need not be reached through a welter of blood 
and hatred. We can imagine the nations settling the 
racial allocation of the temperate or tropical breeding- 
grounds, or even deliberately placing the males and 
females of the few hopelessly backward tribes on 
different islands, without the necessity that the most 
violent passions of mankind should be stimulated in 
preparation for a general war. No one now expects 
an immediate, or prophesies with certainty an ultimate, 
Federation of the Globe; but the consciousness of a 
common purpose in mankind, or even the acknowledg- 
ment that such a common purpose is possible, would 
alter the face of world-politics at once. The discussion 
at The Hague of a halt in the race of armaments would 
no longer seem Utopian, and the strenuous profession 
by the colonizing powers that they have no selfish ends 
in view might be transformed from a sordid and use- 
less hypocrisy into a fact to which each nation might 
adjust its policy. The irrational race-hatred which 
breaks out from time to time on the fringes of empire 
would have little effect in world politics when opposed 
by a consistent conception of the future of human 
progress. 

Meanwhile, it is true, the military preparations for 
a death-struggle of empires still go on, and the problem 
even of peaceful immigration becomes yearly more 
threatening, now that shipping companies can land tens 
of thousands of Chinese or Indian labourers for a 
pound or two a head at any port in the world. But 



NATIONALITY AND HUMANITY 307 



when we think of such things we need no longer feel 
ourselves in the grip of a Fate that laughs at human 
purpose and human kindliness. An idea of the whole 
existence of our species is at last a possible background 
to our individual experience. Its emotional effect may- 
prove to be not less than that of the visible temples 
and walls of the Greek cities, although it is formed 
not from the testimony of our eyesight, but from the 
knowledge which we acquire in our childhood and 
confirm by the half-conscious corroboration of our 
dailv life. 

We all of us, plain folk and learned alike, now make 
a picture for ourselves of the globe with its hemi- 
spheres of light and shadow, from every point of which 
the telegraph brings us hourly news, and which may 
already be more real to us than the fields and houses 
past which we hurry in the train. We can all see it, 
hanging and turning in the monstrous emptiness of 
the skies, and obedient to forces whose action we can 
watch hundreds of light-years away and feel in the 
beating of our hearts. The sharp new evidence of the 
camera brings every year nearer to us its surface of 
ice and rock and plain, and the wondering eyes of 
alien peoples. 

It may be that we shall long continue to differ as 
to the full significance of this vision. But now that 
we can look at it without helpless pain it may stir 
the deepest impulses of our being. To some of us it 
may bring confidence in that Love that Dante saw, "which 



308 HUMAN NATURE IN POLITICS 



moves the Sun and the other Stars." To each of us 
it may suggest a kinder pity for all the bewildered 
beings who hand on from generation to generation the 
torch of conscious life. 



INDEX 



Abyssinia, Italian invasion of, 293 
Acland, Mr., 209 
Adams, John, 135 
Airedale, 285 

America, appointment of non- 
elected officials in, 257 

Civil Sendee, 271 

science and politics in, 204 

tendency to electoral con- 
centration in, 242 

Amos, 96 

Ampthill. Lord, 302 

Antigone, 95 

Aristotle, comparison of State to 
a ship, 286; criticism of Plato's 
communism, 71; definition of 
"polity." 97; maximum size of 
a State, 284; on action as the 
end of politics, 186; on political 
affection, 53 

Athens, glassmakers of, 134 

Sophocles' love of, 210 

Austin, John, 177 

Bacon, Francis, 157, 203; At- 
lantis of, 196 

Bagehot, Walter, 158 
Balfour, IVIr. A. J., 50, 127 

Jabez, 258 

Balliol College, 162 
Ballot. 230 et seq. 
Barrie, Mr. J. ISL, 123 
Bebel, 181 
Beccaria, 39 

Bentham. Jeremy, 31. 193; Ma- 
caulay"s attack on, 46; on crimi- 
nology', 39; on "natural right," 



138 et seq. ; Principles of Morals 
and Legislation, 35 
Benthamism, as a science of 
politics, 139, 196 

Berlin, Congress of, 1885, 177 

Bernstein, 115 

Bismarck, 98; and artificial homo- 
geneity of national type, 288, 
292; on political egoism, 293 

Bolingbroke, Lord, 192 

Botha, General, 295 

Breeding, selective, 197 

Brighton Parade, 121 

British Empire, difficulty of con- 
ceiving as a political entity, 
101; national homogeneity in, 
294; political status of non- 
European races in. 32 

Bronte, Charlotte, 285 

Br>-an, Mr. W. J., 262 

Bryce, Mr. James, 143 et seq. 

Buckle, H. T., 153 

Billow, Prince, on dominance of 
PrussicL, 292; on private and 
national morality, 303; on uni- 
versal suffrage, 181 

Burke, Edmund, 58. 168; on man's 
power of political reasoning, 
200; on "party-," 104 

Burney, Fanny, 56 

Bums,' Robert, 123 

Butler, Bishop, 214 

Canning, George, 243, 289 
Carlyle, Thomas, 36, 268; essay 

on Bums of. 207 
Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 237 



309 



310 



INDEX 



Cavour, 98 

Cecil, Lord Robert, 229, 243 

Chadwick, Sir E., 139 

Chamberlain, Mr. Joseph, 106 

Charity Schools, 72 

Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 82, 126, 

201 
China, 31 
Chinese Labour, agitation against, 

126 
Christianity and race question. 

301 

Harnack on expansion of, 

92 

Churchill, Lord Randolph, 193 
Civil Service, creation of English, 
263 et seq. 

of India, 218 et seq. 

importance of an indepen- 
dent, 260 et seq'. 

• Sir C. Trevelyan's Report 

on, 265 et seq. 

Comenius, 39 

Competition, system of, in muni- 
cipal appointments, 269 

in railway appointments, 272 

variety in methods of, 274 

Comte, Auguste, 90, 217 
Corrupt Practices Act, 29, 228 
Corrupt Practices Act, practical 

failure of, 229 

Corruption, prevented by com- 
petitive Civil Service, 271 

Courtney, Lord, 233 et seq. 

Crimean War, 268 

Dante, 308 

Darwin, Charles, 192, 268; cor- 
respondence with Lyell, 206; 
effect of his work, 199; on per- 
sistence of racial variation, 300 
et seq.; Origin of Species of, 
36 

Demosthenes, 224 



Derby, Lord, Reform Act of, 267 

De Wet, 62 

Diderot, 73 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 193 

Dolling, Father, 211 

Education Act, 1870, 248 

Egypt, 222 

Esher Committee, 278 

Fenelon, 222 

Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, 106 

Fourier, 71 

Fox, Charles James, 264 

I 

Gambetta, 213 

Galen, 142 

Gardiner, Professor S. R., 169 

Garfield, President, 130 

George III. and American Revo- 
lution, 137; and Fox's India 
Bill, 264; popularity of, 56 

German Emperor, 280 

Gladstone^ W. E., and English 
Civil Service, 267; and Queen 
Victoria, 193; on change of 
opinion, 115; on Ireland, 167 
et seq.; parliamentary oratory 
of, 182 

Government Departments, organi- 
zation of, 275 et seq. 

Gresham's Law, 196 

Grote, George, 139 

Hadley, a. T., 204 
Hague, The, 307 
Hall, Professor Stanley, 40 
Harnack, T., 92 
Helvetius, 222 
Herbart, J. F., 39 
Hicks-Beach, Miss, 101 
Hippocrates, 142 
Hobbes, Thomas, 39 
Homoiousians, 297 



INDEX 



311 



Homoousians, 297 
Hume. Joseph, 220 
Huxley, T. H., 205; Lay Sermons 

of, 269 
Hyndman, Mr., 113 

India, 291 

and representative democ- 
racy, 219 

applicability of democratic 



principles in, 32 

— appointment of East India 
Company officials, 264 

— Civil Service, 218 

— English dislike of natives in, 



79 
Individualism, curve of, 165 
Ireland, Home Rule for, 168 

Jackson, Andrew, 257 

James, Professor William, 40, 65 
(note) ; on sense of effective 
reality, 65; Principles of Psy- 
chology of, 207 

Jameson, Dr., 214 

Japan, 304 

Japanese, mental environment of, 
212 

State Papers, 215 

Jevons, Professor, 159 

Jury. See Trial by Jury 

Justice, conception of, as political 
term, 94 

Justinian, 97 

Kossuth, Louis, 291 

Labour Party and intellectual 
conditions of representative 
government, 250 

Lansdowne, Lord, 194, 195 

Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 295 

Le Bon, G., 75 

Lingen, Lord, 266 



Local Government Acts of 1888 
and 1894, 241 

Locke, John, and basis of govern- 
ment, 196; and pedagogy, 39; 
on relation of man to God's law, 
137 

Lombroso, C, 39 

London, Borough Council elec- 
tions, 239 

creation of love for, 210 

lack of citizenship in, 103 

proportion of active regis- 
tered vomers in, 247 

provision of schools in, 164 

et seq. 

School Board elections in, 



237 



County Council Debating 

Hall, 164 
election posters, 

125 
Lyell, Sir Charles, 206 
Lyndhurst, Lord, 132 

Macaulay, Lord, 51; and East 
India Company, 264; Essay in 
Edinburgh Review on Bentham- 
ism, 46 

MacCulloch, J. R., 36 

Macedonia, 291 

Macewen, Sir William, 208 

Marseillaise, 106 

Marshall, Professor, 160, 166 

Marx, Karl, 36 

Mazzini, Joseph, attack on cos- 
mopolitanism, 289; on geo- 
graphical division of humanity, 
289 et seq. 

Mendel, Abbot, 214 

Merivale, Mr. Herman, 145 

Metternich, 98 

Mill, James, 249 (note) 

J. S., 139; on mankind in 

the average, 144, 176; opposi- 



312 



INDEX 



tion to the Ballot of, 230 et 

seq. 
Milner, Lord, 294. 295 
Molesworth, Sir W., 139 
More, Sir Thomas, Republic of, 

196 
Morgan, Professor Lloyd, 40 
Morley, Lord, 223; on W. E. 

Gladstone, 167 et seq. 
Morris, William, 90, 113, 285 
Municipal Representation Bill, 

239 

Napoleon I. and psychology of 
war, 194, 213 

Louis, 58 

Negro Suffrage in United States, 
31 

Nevinson, Mr. H. W., 219 

Newman, J. H., 268; on personi- 
fication, 91 

Nicholas IL, 144 

North, Lord, 264 

Northcote, Sir Stafford, 265 

Olivter, Sir Sydney, 299 (note) 
Ostrogorski, Professor, 143 et seq. 
Owen, Robert, 71 

Paine, Thomas, 243 
Pal, Mr. Chandra, 195 
Palmerston, Lord, 57 
Pankhurst, Mrs., 195 (note) 
Parnell, C. S., 194 
Parramatta Tea, 108 et seq. 
Party as a political entity, 103 
Patroclus, 85 

Pearson, Professor Karl, 150 
Peel, Sir Robert, 111 
Pericles, 94 
Persia, 31 
Philadelphia, 242 
Philippines, 31 
Place, Francis, 139 



Plato, 96; "cave of illusion" of, 
133; his "harmony of the Soul" 
in modern political life, 205, 
212; on basis of government, 35; 
on government by consent, 217; 
on idea of perfect man, 136; on 
the public, 190; religion in the 
Republic of, 221; Republic of, 
196 

Playfair Commission, 274 

Poor Law Commission of 1834, 
173 et seq. 

of 1905, 174 et 

seq. 

Proportional Representation and 
Lord Courtney, 234 et seq. 

Society, 236 

Prospero, 120 

Putney, 125 

Race Problem and representa- 
tive democracy, 30 

in international politics, 

78, 290 et seq. 

in India, 79 



Reform Act of 1867, 227, 267 
Religion of Comte, 90 

in Plato's Republic, 221 



Representative democracy and 
India, 219 

and race problem, 30 

in Egypt, 222 

in England, 26 

in United States, 26 



Rome, 98 

Roosevelt, Theodore, 38 

Rousseau, J. J., and pedagogy, 

39; on human rights, 137 
Rural Parish Councils, 242 
Ruskin, John, 13, 285 

Samuel, Mr. Herbert, 243 

Schnadhorst, Mr., 268 

Science, as an entity, 203 et seq. 



INDEX 



313 



Seeley, J. R., Expansion of Eng- 
land of, 294 
Senior, Nassau, 36 

Political Economy of, 35 

Shelley, 171 

Socialism, conception of as a 
working creed, 112 

cun'e of, 165 

Socrates, 94, 209 
Somerset House, 261 
Sophocles, 210 
Spencer, Herbert, 37 
Stein. H. F., 98 
Stephen, Sir James, 267 
Suffrage, for women at 1906 elec- 
tion, 29 

negro, 31 

universal, Prince Billow's at- 
tack on, 181 et seq. 

Swift. Dean, 192 
Swinburne, A. C, 291 

Tammany Hall, 128 
Tarde, G., 75 
Tennyson, Lord, 89 
Thackeray, 71 
Togo, Admiral, 80 
Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 265 et seq. 
Trial by Jury, development of, 
224 et seq. 



Tweefontein, 62 
Tyrrell, Father, 114 

United Kingdom, proportion of 
elected to electors in, 257 

United States and Negro Suffrage, 
31 

and representative de- 
mocracy, 26 

Vaux, M.^ame de, 91 
Vereeniging, Peace of, 294 
Victoria, Queen, 193; on com- 
petition for Indian Army com- 
missions. 267; portrait of, oh 
coins, 55 
Virgin of Kevlaar, 93 

War Office Council, 277 

Wells, Mr. H. G., on delocalized 
population, 286; on representa- 
tive democracy, 217; on "sense 
of the State," 210; on unique- 
ness of the individual, 148 

Whately, Archbishop, 36 

Women's Suffrage at 1906 elec- 
tion, 30 

methods of suffragists, 



195 

Wood, Mr. M'Kinnon, 106 
Wordsworth, Prelude of, 172, 207 



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